The Love of the Dead

by Craig Saunders

  It was obvious that this wasn’t about a few mediums in Norfolk.

  Coleridge counted the alcoves. Tried to. In columns of six, right around the room. Not all were filled, but a lot. Maybe three quarters, four fifths, something like that. Someone better at math would count this up. The papers would probably run a spread, a list of all the dead. All that could be identified, anyway. Plenty were just bone and teeth. People who’d gone missing over the years. Maybe ten years. Twenty. Thirty? Coleridge just didn’t know. This was a long term thing. Freeman might be able to figure out how old the oldest skull was. It wasn’t Coleridge’s field of expertise.

  Fuck. This wasn’t anyone’s field of expertise.

  He tried to get some kind of figure in his head, but he couldn’t work it out. He couldn’t do it. His mind didn’t want to do it. It was more terrible than he could ever have imagined, but his cop’s mind was taking over, reasoning things out so that he didn’t have to think about it straight on. His mind sidled up to the sight, and went sideways, giving him an out. Think about reasons. Think about possibility. Find questions first then worry about finding the answers.

  He had two questions straight away, and like a pair of crutches they held him up. Held him so he could keep on.

  He turned to Mooney. Mooney didn’t look like he was willing to muck about anymore. You couldn’t, not here. Get the funniest guy in the world down here and he’d just make you cry.

  “Where are the hearts?” he asked.

  Mooney shook his head.

  “My first question, too. Don’t know is the only answer we’ve got at the moment. Seeing this, I’m not sure I want to know.”

  Coleridge agreed, but whether he wanted to know or not, he thought he’d have to know. It might not matter, but there was a lot riding on this. It wasn’t done. He knew it. The other cops knew it, too.

  Beth knew it better than anyone.

  “Second question—is this some kind of torture chamber?” he pointed at the bed, his thick finger shaking in a way he didn’t like. He put his hand back by his side. “Did he bring people here? Make them look at this lot? Then kill them?”

  “There’s the punchline, Coleridge. He didn’t put anyone there. Just himself.”

  “What?”

  “That’s his bed. See the drip?”

  “His?”

  Mooney nodded. “Spot on. Know what it is?”

  “No. You find out?”

  Mooney nodded again. Taking a little pleasure from figuring something out, but not much. You couldn’t take much pleasure from this. Not even from a job well done. All you could take from this was nightmares.

  “Sedative and a drip.”

  Coleridge shook his head, he didn’t understand.

  “There’s the kicker. The yellow stuff on the bed? Pus. Bed sores. An autopsy’ll give us a better idea, but the best we can figure for now is that Sawyer was sedated on this bed, in among this lot, for weeks. It takes weeks to develop bed sores like he had. He was practically decomposing. Maybe four weeks? What do you reckon?” Mooney looked at Coleridge, his heavy eyes showed he knew the answer well enough. It didn’t require any input from Coleridge.

  “I don’t get it. Mooney, what the fuck is going on? Can you tell me that? Please. What the fuck?”

  “Nobody gets it. Sawyer’s probably been under for weeks, probably since the killing started. But then there’s this. You looked? Looked properly?”

  Coleridge stared at Mooney for a second, then forced his legs to carry him back to the walls, the alcoves. All the heads.

  He walked ’round the walls. Looked at each face. Finally he got to one he recognized.

  “Dean?”

  “No way Sawyer could’ve killed him. He was comatose, on that bed. No doubt about it. Couldn’t fake the way his body looked. His body was eating itself. If he hadn’t died in a hospital, he probably would’ve died down here anyway. Fuck, Coleridge. I’ve seen his body. Remember we found that girl’s body? Been in an attic for a year? Looked worse than hers when he was still alive.”

  “But this...this has been going on for years.”

  “We had a pathologist in here. Said the way the basement is sealed, cool...he reckoned the oldest head could be thirty-odd years old. Maybe forty. Get this—the oldest heads in here? The one’s that are just bones? He said he’d have to get a specialist to look at them. He wouldn’t even guess at how old they are.”

  “Sawyer’s been doing this for that long? Nobody’s ever cottoned on? Fuck. How do you get away with it?”

  But Mooney was shaking his head again.

  “It just keeps getting better. You’ll love this.”

  “I don’t think I will.”

  “No, maybe not. But still...Sawyer’s down here, got all these heads, fancy house and all...been at it a while, right? Maybe making some money out of these people he’s killed?”

  “Maybe.”

  “It doesn’t add up. Because we found Sawyer’s driving license. Positive ID. No doubt. We checked, double checked, fuck, we quadruple checked. Nobody wants to fuck this up. He was thirty-four years old.”

  Coleridge stared at Mooney, waiting for a joke. A grin. Something.

  But Mooney just stared right back. Nodded. “If these are all his,” he said, “then he must have been killing since he was about four years old. If the bones are older than that...”

  Coleridge could feel his head swimming. He was either getting hungry, or getting ready to puke. He didn’t fancy anything on offer in the basement, and he was damned if he’d throw up like some rookie.

  “Come on. Let’s get the fuck out of here. I’ve seen all I want to see.”

  “You want to see the body?”

  “Yeah, I do,” he said, although it wasn’t strictly true. “But for now, I’m hungry.”

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Traffic moved again on the M1 after nearly two hours. The whole time Peter had a signal. He tried Beth’s number every half an hour, counting down the minutes like a ritual just to keep from going mad.

  She didn’t pick up. When the traffic started moving again, he kept to his routine.

  Dial the number, wait, nothing. He hung up and drove on.

  From the M1 to the A1, down toward Peterborough.

  He pulled in twice for the toilet. After lunch, he didn’t use the phone again. There was no point.

  No point in doing anything but driving.

  Peter Willis had no spiritual beliefs. He didn’t see ghosts or experience prescience. That had always been Beth’s domain. She had her spirits and once she’d had her beliefs.

  And yet, as he drove hard from the north to the south, through the middle of the country, he was sure something other was urging him on. He could feel Beth’s need. He’d always been connected to her in some deeper sense than man and wife. They’d met young, fallen hard. Their only child, Miles, had come along and everything had seemed right. Their lives had been perfect.

  While he’d never attended Beth’s church, he’d never ridiculed her. When she said she wanted to become a medium, he’d supported her fully. Just because he was an atheist, he didn’t begrudge other people their beliefs. Over time she had proven to him, beyond a doubt, that there were things he could never understand. And yet he’d still held back.

  But he couldn’t hold back any longer.

  When he hit the A47, just out of Peterborough, he had a vision.

  A small hand joined his on the steering wheel.

  Suddenly cold, he jumped and let out a cry. He looked ’round, and even though it was the middle of the day, he saw blackness at the edge of his vision. Like a shadow in the passenger seat.

  He turned back to the road, afraid to take his eyes off the pavement. When he looked ahead, he could see the outline of a small boy in the seat next to him. He turned and looked again, but there was nothing there. And yet the feeling that some cold hand was laying over his persisted.

  The hand squeezed his, hard, and then it was gone. He realized he had goose bum
ps. The air in the car was suddenly frigid. He turned the heater up and put his foot down harder on the accelerator. There were no police in sight and it was a long way to the east coast yet.

  That hand was familiar. The feeling of the hand, the memory of it...he cried, but he wiped his eyes and drove on.

  12:37 PM. Time ticking down.

  He didn’t know it, but at the same time, Beth sat with her foot in a bucket of ice water and saw him, clear as day.

  Saw him through Miles’ eyes.

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Three hours before Peter’s vision of Miles, give or take, ice cubes thudded dully against a plastic tub, the water rocking as Beth put it down on the carpet in her bedroom. Some of the water splashed over the side, but she wasn’t worried about a wet carpet.

  She could hear the policemen in the kitchen, spoons rattling as sugar was stirred into tea, whispered conversations. She couldn’t make out the words, but she could imagine them talking about her, telling each other all the weird things she’d done while they were watching over her. Fainted dead away in the night, they’d say. Talked to someone that wasn’t there earlier. Did you see the ice, falling out of the freezer? She’s a weird one, alright.

  The truth was, she used to be. She needed to get that back. Miles had died, and though she remained gifted, if you could call it that, she didn’t have her strength of faith behind her anymore.

  There was a time when she never would have dreamed of using Tarot cards or getting out the crystal ball she used to impress her more impressionable customers. That was just flim-flam, crowd pleasers.

  She used to be a hell of a lot weirder.

  Some mediums, the real deal, were able to turn it on and off. They could invite spirits in, open themselves to spirits when it suited them. They were a one-way conduit. They’d give a reading, maybe they’d be spot on, give evidence like they were taught, so the churchgoers would know that it was their loved one that came through. That it was a message for them. If a spirit wanted to come through enough for a real message, it was usually important to the person receiving the message.

  Sometimes even she’d thought the mediums she’d seen weren’t up to much. Far too much bullshit for her liking. She could see the dead while they were talking, even if they couldn’t.

  There was a time when she’d have given messages to strangers on the street, because the dead were so damned forceful with her. She couldn’t turn it off. She couldn’t not see them. She couldn’t not give people what the dead wanted to give.

  They might not be able to speak, but they’d show her pictures. Sometimes she’d misinterpret them, but not often. She was truly gifted. She knew that.

  But then Miles had died and all that had changed. She’d withdrawn. Tried to turn it off. Turned away from faith and used her gift for her own purposes. Bastardized it. Bought whiskey and cigarettes with the money she made from telling penny fortunes to desperate people. She’d stopped giving people the messages that spirits demanded. She’d used it for her own gain.

  She’d used the dead so she could make money, and there was no easy way to look at that. She didn’t think about it often. It was what she needed that was important. Not what they needed.

  Some days she even thought she hated them. They were always there, always clamoring for her attention. The dead were with her when she went to sleep and when she woke. To be able to turn it off, just for a day. To have some peace, when they weren’t watching her, when they didn’t need her.

  But it wasn’t for her to decide. Spirits wanted what spirits wanted. She could feel the call now and it was too powerful to ignore.

  She realized something that she had forgotten, long ago, when she’d seen her son dying beneath a car’s wheels, his body shattered, his face in agony, and known such terrible guilt that she’d wanted to die.

  Too much of a coward to do it, though. She couldn’t face being one of the lost dead herself. There were things left unsaid, things left undone. She’d had a good life, maybe, to that point. But with such a weight of guilt she knew there’d be no solace for her beyond the grave. Just an eternity spent trying to pay it back.

  She was afraid to die. It should have been a comfort, to know that there was a world after death. But not for her. It would be denied her, like so many of the spirits she saw. She’d walk the earth in chains until the end of time. Until the rapture, maybe, when the spirits of the earth were free.

  But how long would that be and how much longer could she deny it? Tonight, she would meet her death. He was coming for her. The Devil himself.

  There was no denying that. And she was afraid because death meant an eternity after her body was torn beyond repair.

  There was one chance. They were screaming at her to come back to her calling. To stop serving herself and serve a greater purpose.

  She didn’t want to. She wanted to run and run and keep on running until she had no breath left and her lungs burned. She’d give it all right now to be someone else.

  But she wouldn’t run. She couldn’t.

  Gregory Sawyer had been found and now he was dead, but she was sure it wasn’t the end the spirits wanted.

  They were calling for her death.

  Maybe by serving she could wipe some of the guilt away. Atone.

  Maybe she would just die, and the spirits would take revenge for the evil she had done.

  Did it matter when she had no choice?

  When every choice ended with her death, what did it matter? Nothing. She could not avoid it. Once, she might have welcomed it, but now it held only terror.

  And yet spirits had a hand in this. They had an interest in this that she didn’t understand.

  The only way she would find out was if she let them in, one more time. Let them show her what they wanted. Give her the future. Give her the strength to face the Devil and see the true face of the killer.

  No choice at all.

  She lowered her left foot into the freezing water, gasped at the sudden, stunning cold on her bare foot.

  No choice.

  She laid back on the bed and invited them in.

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Beth drifted in a state that was neither asleep nor awake. Some place other than her body, high above, in the air or in that space between the solid world and the world of mist where spirits wait, beyond the reach of time and space, no gravity, no barriers. A place where you could go as you will.

  Beth didn’t know where she wanted to go, or where she needed to go. She had a thousand questions but nowhere to start.

  But the spirits offered a guiding hand.

  She was led in some sense she didn’t understand. One moment, or maybe hours, days, years, she was lost in the mist and then it cleared away as a morning fog will do when the sun hits it.

  She was in a basement somewhere, filled with unnatural light. Heads adorned the walls, and the part of her that was still tethered to her body felt the horror of the place. Spirits insulated her from the worst of it, so she could bear witness.

  The center of the room became clear, pulled her focus down.

  A man checked some bags of clear liquid hanging from a metal pole with hooks branching out from the top.

  It was clearly the killer. She knew his face. She knew those hands, so nimble and clever.

  He lay down on crisp white sheets surround by the heads of those he’d murdered.

  The killer radiated power. His body was strong and well muscled. He was naked, and some part of her appreciated him for what he was. He was perfection, at the height of his strength, in the prime of life.

  But there was a darkness surrounding him, something unknowable, a core of him that spirits’ vision could not penetrate.

  His secret self. Something more than a man.

  Surrounded by the dead, watched by them, he lay down and inserted the tubes carefully into a cannula in the back of his hand. His preparations were meticulous. No mistakes, because this was the culmination of his purpose.

  He turned a small
tap, a spigot, and the fluid was released. She saw his eyes close, his breathing slow.

  Time shifted and she saw his body wither and the dark core of him grow, becoming stronger. Spirits could not bear the darkness. It would pull them into its vortex.

  It was pure evil.

  Suddenly, jarring her senses, she was further in the past. She saw him sitting at a table in a grand dining room above the death room, at a thick mahogany table. Silverware laid precisely at a table set for one.

  There was no accomplice. She understood that now. Everything that had been done had been done by him.

  He was young, but he was old, too. His strength and power came from something else. A ritual meal, laid before him.

  He wasn’t mortal, even in this form. He couldn’t be. On a plate before him a heart rested. He picked up a fork and speared it, then cut off a chunk with a sharp knife. He had to saw at it, as the heart was tough. It wasn’t an animal heart, and it was raw.

  Revulsion floated away as the mist enveloped her once again.

  Warmth filled her as the mist next drifted from her eyes and she saw Peter. Her emotions where stunted in this world of mist, but she could still feel something tugging at her.

  She saw through Miles’ eyes and could understand Miles’ love of his father perfectly, even though it was a kind of understanding born of pure intellect rather than emotion.

  Miles was saying goodbye in the only way he could. He put a hand on his father’s hand and squeezed. Peter couldn’t see his son, but Beth knew from the tears in her ex-husband’s eyes that he had felt the touch, knew who it was, even if he didn’t know what it meant.

  Beth wished she didn’t know. She didn’t want to see their goodbye or understand the meaning of it.

  Even insulated here in the world between worlds, that hurt, right to her core. She almost tumbled back to her body. She’d seen enough. She knew enough.