Creep

by R. M. Greenaway

  Someone in the crowd guessed right: a party-pooper.

  Leith broke free and straightened his horns. “C’mon, man, I tried!”

  Then Monty’s inebriation was suddenly gone, to Leith’s surprise; he was no longer crocked, but his normal, pleasant self, saying, “I’m happy to see you, believe me, but where’s your better half and baby girl? I was hoping to meet ’em.”

  “Izzy’s still a bit young for the hour. Where’s your better half?”

  “On her way,” Monty said. “Promise. But what are you waiting for? Get yourself a damn drink and go compare battle scars, or whatever we cops do at parties.”

  Over the next hour, Leith lost the new-kid feeling, and even enjoyed some of the conversations he was pulled into. He wasn’t the only party-pooper, it turned out, and with a generous rum and Coke inside, it was all pretty funny, anyway. Two drinks was his limit, maybe two and a half, as he planned to be dead sober by midnight.

  Cal Dion showed up. Jeans, T-shirt, and a rather artsy cardigan with blocky patterns of various colours. No attempt at a costume, unless the cardigan was it. Leith braced himself, because conversations with Dion never went well, and made his way over. “Hey, how’re you doing?”

  “Hey,” Dion said, looking pleasantly surprised. “I’m great. You?”

  So far so good, Leith thought. “Fine,” he said. “That’s a cool sweater.”

  “Thanks. I like your costume. It’s convincing.”

  “Huh,” Leith said, and was stuck. Then he recalled certain pleasantries he could share. “Monty says you got some info out of the Mesachee biker kid, Ron Graham. Got him to admit they were just making stuff up.”

  “Not really making stuff up.”

  “Whatever. Point is, whoever’s creeping about in the woods, he’s of this earth.”

  “And probably nothing to do with anything, either. Just a dead end.”

  “Still, that was sharp of you, catching him out.”

  “It wasn’t sharp,” Dion said. “It was obvious. I was waiting for you to pin Graham down, ’cause he was practically shouting I don’t agree with my buddy James Bond here. ’Cause up to then, they were backing each other up all the way. It came to the howl, and Graham went silent. It was written all over his face, if you’d looked over at him instead of focusing on the other clown. By saying nothing, he was saying everything: There was no blood-curdling howl, and me and James are full of shit.”

  “Huh,” Leith said again.

  Dion appeared to listen intently to something — maybe the echoes of his own nastiness. “Where’s the beer?” he said. Leith pointed the way and was left blessedly alone. Joy.

  Putting Dion out of his mind, he picked up where he had left off, sipping at his rationed cocktail and socializing. Along with police and civil servants were people from the outer world, friends of the famous fiancée that Leith was yet to meet. Tori was due soon, apparently. Off in Richmond on a modelling assignment.

  He stood looking at a large black-and-white photograph of the woman on a wall, framed against simple black glass. It was a professional shot, and she was gorgeous. Sweetly so, pale and delicate, with a shy, sidelong smile that seemed to say she was clutching a bouquet of wildflowers behind her back, and was about to spring them on you. No wonder Monty was dizzy about her. Still studying the photo, Leith wondered if Tori was after Monty for his money. Which he would have plenty of, with that upwardly mobile career of his.

  He wondered if he was jealous. Probably.

  An hour later, still no Tori. Leith had seen a few partiers in theatrical makeup come and go. He kept an eye out for werewolves, but saw none, which was just fine with him. By the third hour, he was ready to leave. He saw Dion talking with Monty now, and not only smiling, but laughing. Laughing. That was a first. Laughter looked good on him. Yet another accomplishment by the amazing Michelin Montgomery, turning water into wine.

  Maybe a little jealous, yes.

  A beep at Leith’s wrist told him it was time to push off. Tonight was Halloween, and mischief was afoot. More than likely, he would be contacted as the team got swamped with call-outs. He wouldn’t be called about the little goblins blowing off their fingers with firecrackers or stealing each other’s candy, or about the bush parties getting out of hand at the dam or the local parks. It was the bigger goblins he was concerned with. A few of those would be out and about as well, no doubt, taking advantage of Mask Day to get away with murder.

  * * *

  Dion stood in a small bay of solitude, away from the main crowd, and watched the action. Montgomery had roped him into conversation, calling him a fucking cheapskate — “Not even a Walmart set of hillbilly teeth?” When the conversation had gotten too fast and slippery, he had made his break. A side effect of head injury was an inability to deal with too much overlapping information, which was a good reason to avoid parties. Confusion led to panic, which led to bad choices. Turning, he saw David Leith in his red T-shirt setting down an empty glass and not picking up a refill.

  Dion wished he had apologized to Leith on the spot. Even five minutes later wouldn’t do it. An immediate and simple Sorry, man, I was out of line, would have been good enough. Or better yet, Sorry, sir. But out of line didn’t sound natural — and wasn’t completely true. Probably in clarifying, he would have only made things worse. Better to keep his mouth shut.

  He saw a woman dressed as plush dice intercept Leith, pulling him into a chat. The star of the party, Tori, was still nowhere in sight. Why was he waiting for her? Because she was funny. Not that he would ever want to deal with her one on one, but in a safe environment like this, it could be quite a show.

  Leith had broken free of the dice lady, and he headed for the door, collecting his jacket on his way out. Others left, too, and more arrived, bringing a fresh swell of party atmosphere and the din of conversation. Dion wove his way through bodies to Montgomery, waited for a gap in the conversation, and asked, “Will Tori be here anytime soon?”

  “Just texted,” Montgomery told him. “Still at her gig in Richmond. Photo shoot. Supposed to be back by now. Must have got held up. You’re not running off, are you?”

  Half an hour more, Dion decided. His beer was going warm in his hand. A new guest arrived, another who hadn’t bothered with a costume. Constable Jackie Randall, off duty, wearing jeans and a heavy blue polo shirt under her parka. “Trick or treat!” she sang out, scraping her boots on the welcome mat.

  He was glad to see a familiar face. He waved her over, and she plucked a can of Diet Pepsi from the cooler and joined him, saying, “Hello there. Fancy meeting you by the potato chips.”

  “I didn’t expect to see you here!”

  “I didn’t either, frankly. But I decided I just had to come along. Bit of a class reunion. I went to school with Tori in Surrey.”

  Dion expressed polite surprise.

  “Hung out some,” she continued. “Played floor hockey together. Learned to drink and smoke together. But you know how things go. She went her way, I went mine. But when I heard who Corporal Montgomery is engaged to, I just had to come along tonight and see her again. Probably more out of curiosity than anything, but don’t tell her that. Anyway, she’s not here, so looks like it just might not happen, judging by that clock on the wall and considering my own ridiculously early bedtime. I’ll just stick around an hour and then go.”

  Dion wasn’t going to stick around that long. He would talk to Randall for a few minutes, then excuse himself and go.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” she was saying. “Jackie Randall plays hockey? Yup, and I wasn’t a bad goalie. Wide, you know.” She grinned. She talked about hockey for a while, as Dion crunched on crackers, daydreamed, and counted down the minutes. “… And it was brutal,” she said, having tacked off on another topic. “Regina doesn’t make it easy for us short ones.”

  By Regina she meant Depot, where RCMP recruits were tr
ained. “Must have been tough.”

  “Brutal,” she said again. “What got me through was proof. Proving that I could do it to all those who doubted me. Which was everybody I know. And it was worth it. The parade, the ceremonies, the I-told-you-so’s. I can still taste grad. I thought my heart would burst. Did you hear we got a name for John Doe?”

  The body in the crawl space.

  “Benjamin Clifford Stirling,” she went on. “Ben. Changes things in your own heart, doesn’t it? Knowing his name, seeing his picture. He was a nice-looking boy.”

  Randall gazed around at the room decorated in orange and black streamers, large fake spiders climbing up and down fake webs, and said more cheerfully, “I’m surprised she’s so late. Her audience is waiting. She should be table-dancing by now.”

  “I heard she’s working in Richmond,” Dion said. “I also heard she’s always late for everything.”

  Randall snorted. “You can say that again. She’s like the opposite of a team player. On Tori’s priority list, Tori always comes first. If she’s having too much fun wherever she is, she probably won’t show up at all. Don’t repeat this to anybody, but Tori and Monty — it’s going to be the marriage from hell.”

  It was a depressing prediction. Dion not only liked Montgomery, he would have liked to have had him for a father. He wanted the upcoming Montgomery marriage to be made in heaven, not hell. “Who’s Benjamin Stirling? Where’s he from?”

  “Saskatchewan. He’s a nobody, at this point. Not even certified yet it’s him, but blood type’s a match, facial structure looks promising. Dental records look okay, too, but yet to be confirmed. They’re having trouble with that because Ben’s last dental X-ray was when he was ten. They’ve located his brother, Sam, a CP yardman who lives in Rush Lake, which is near Swift Current. He says he last heard from Ben in April and reported him missing in May. Like a lot of young people, Ben left the prairies and came west looking for work and all the rest of it — thrills, malls, new social circles.”

  “And an ocean,” Dion added.

  “And that. Sam says Ben was a good kid. Deep, he says. Never been incarcerated, but kind of a misfit. He was twenty-three when he took off, would be twenty-four now. Nobody took the missing report too seriously, he says, because Ben wasn’t great at staying in touch. But he wouldn’t have dropped off the map, either, Sam says.”

  “And you picked up all this how?”

  “Eyes and ears open,” she said. “As you know, I’m not in GIS — yet — but every chance I get, I’m up there. They’ve even got me helping with some real grungy, bottom-of-the-barrel tasks.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “Thank you. Sadly, there won’t be much for Sam to ID when he gets here, but he’s flying over, anyway, to see how he can help out. We expect him tomorrow at four o’clock.”

  Dion watched a heavy man dressed as a bumblebee buzz in tight circles around Montgomery. A tinfoil crown flew like a Frisbee. The loop of Halloween music was getting tiresome — “Monster Mash” again. Still no sign of Tori.

  No more guests were arriving, and a few were leaving. Trick-or-treaters still rang the bell, but no more little kids at this hour. Only teens with painted faces. Drunken fairies handed out more insults than candies. In a gap of silence between songs, somebody’s cellphone went off, and every vampire, bumblebee, and go-go dancer in the room checked their device. So did Jackie Randall. So did Dion.

  But it was Michelin Montgomery’s phone that was ringing. Dion saw him answer and saw a range of emotions that were, maybe, just the effects of liquor: surprise, then something like alarm, then a smile of recognition. Montgomery plugged an ear and spun a finger at his guests to carry on, then walked away — not so steady on his feet — to find a quieter place to talk.

  A little blonde woman with a wired-on halo shouted after him, “That better be Tori with a big fat apology.”

  On Montgomery’s return, he let the partiers know it was Tori, and she was going to be here any minute now, and she was sorry for the delay. Any minute now was not good enough for Dion. He wished Jackie Randall good night, told her to go easy on the Pepsi, and made his way over to say goodbye to his host. “Thanks for inviting me. It was great. I had a good time.”

  Montgomery turned around, a look of surprise on his face. He clamped Dion on the shoulder with a hand, and slurred, “Seriously, so soon? My girl, didn’t she explicitly tell you to be here?”

  No drunk should ever try to say explicitly. Dion apologized and said to give Tori his regards.

  Montgomery unhanded him with a slight shove. “’Kay. Well, glad you could make it anyway, buddy.” He turned back to his more faithful guests, and Dion looked toward the front foyer. It was so packed and noisy that he decided to find another way out.

  From the living room, he stepped into a kitchen. A few oddly dressed adults stood about in serious conversation, ignoring him as he slipped by. He found a door leading to a veranda, and from there went outside to what turned out to be a large, open deck, where he was suddenly and refreshingly alone. The yard below was dark, and with the door behind him pulled shut, the noise seemed capped off and distant.

  The tension seeped out of his muscles. The sky stretching east to west was dense with clouds, and the rain came down in long arcs, fine but steady. It always rained on Halloween. He had only one precious Halloween memory, fainter every time he called it up and threatening to fade altogether. He must have been four or five. He wore an eye patch, and his mother had knelt to paint a moustache under his nose, then shown him the results in a hand mirror. He could feel and hear that plastic sword scraping along the sidewalk behind him. It was a big adventure — not so much the costume as being outside at night, holding her hand and walking with her into the mysterious darkness. The rain had been light, like it was now; all the way down the block the drops were lit like falling stars, and he had thought — mistakenly as it turned out — that they were leaving forever.

  The faint click of the motion-sensor lights snapped his thoughts back to present. He stared down at the backyard, washed in electric white, and blinked. Midway along the path leading from what must be a back lane stood an angel.

  Eleven

  AZRAEL

  Except she wasn’t an angel. She was a slight young woman in platform shoes and a long gown that rippled with sequins. Her feathery wings confused him, until he recalled this was dress-up night. She looked as shocked as he felt, and he realized he was backlit, probably unrecognizable, and might be seen as a threat. He started forward into the light, but she had come alive and was moving along the cement path toward the stairs at a good clip, her gown gathered up in her fists. From her shoulder swung a little bag as twinkly as her clothes. There was no twinkle in her expression.

  “What the hell are you doing?” She was clumping up toward him. “Standing there in the freezing-cold dark! Trying to scare me to death?”

  He told her he was sorry for scaring her, that he was just leaving, but mid-apology, saw that he was wrong — she wasn’t angry at all. She had climbed the stairs and was smiling at him. “Aha,” she said. “Just having a smoke? Well, that’s all right, then. You’d never guess, but I’m Azrael!” She laughed, swinging side to side to flap her wings. Her teeth were perfectly straight and white, and her green eyes glittered.

  Her wings were a little uneven, Dion saw. They seemed to be made of real feathers — not white, but black or grey blue. He lifted his hands to show he wasn’t smoking, actually, but too late, as the motion sensor flicked off and he and she were once more in near darkness, only faintly lit by the home’s ambient glow.

  “Whew,” she said. “What a night. Shall we go in now, before my feathers get wet? I must make my grand entrance, and you must be part of it. When I squeeze your arm, you lean over and kiss me, okay? Together we shall make my Monty insanely jealous.”

  She had hooked his arm to guide him back through the door, but he
resisted the pull. “Like I said, I’m just leaving. I’m sorry I missed you, but I arrived quite early, so —”

  “Just leaving,” she echoed, with a blurt of laughter. “How can you be just leaving? I just got here!”

  She hooked him tighter and pulled harder, so now he had to plant his shoes and physically unhook her hand with his own. Freed, he moved away from her and toward the stairs, hoping it was all just her idea of good fun. “’Night, Tori.”

  “Wait!” she cried. He stopped, one foot on the top step. She seemed to float toward him through the darkness. Her body blocked the misty rays of light from the windows behind her, and her face was in shadow, so all he could see of her were the whites of her eyes and the pearly gleam of her teeth. “So sorry,” she whispered. “I’m terrible with names, which is extra nasty of me, because you remembered mine. It’s Edwin, isn’t it? Or Edward?”

  “Cal,” he said.

  “Can you do me a big favour, Cal, and stop acting like a complete idiot? I want you to come inside with me and meet my friends.” She took his hand, to his surprise, and brought it to her mouth, gazing up at him as she pulled her lower lip along his knuckles. It was a good performance, and if he wasn’t so baffled, it might have done wonders for his morale. “One friend especially,” she said. “She’s gorgeous, and newly single, and ooh, what a coincidence, you’re single, too! C’mon then, let me introduce you!”

  He stared into her flushed face, saw her chest rising and falling, and wondered if she was climbing or crashing from whatever she was on. “I have to get going. I’m sorry.”

  She whipped out a hand to grab his arm. “You don’t understand,” she hissed. Her hand was fine-boned, but had an iron grip, and her pretty face had grown ugly with fear. “It’s just, I screwed up,” she told him. Her voice had transformed, like her face, and was now low and urgent. “I should have been home hours ago, and Monty, you don’t know him when he’s drunk. And he is drunk. I could hear it on the phone. Please, Cal. I’d feel so much better if we went in together. You can just hang around for a few minutes, make sure everything’s cool, then you can go.”