I nodded. I failed to see the relevance of this, but I remembered it well. All that had been apparent was a gathering general gloom, though I recall that, as it lightened, dogs barked and a cock crowed. My father had seen a far more impressive one decades before in the Yorkshire Dales at Giggleswick. But I digress . . .
Dewar continued, unfazed by my faltering attention. This time, I regret to say, I failed to stifle my yawn.
“Susan—if she is to be believed—had fallen asleep in the lounge. Awaking late in the afternoon, she made tea and took a cup up to Emma, whom she had last seen reading in her room. But Emma was not there. Nor was she anywhere to be found in the house. Front and back doors were locked and could not be opened without a key. Emma had no key and no keys were missing. Likewise, windows were firmly secured. There was no sign of a struggle, nor of forced entry, nothing suggesting abduction. The police carried out the usual searches and enquiries, but drew blanks. No one in the area had witnessed anything suspicious. Emma Travers was added to the long list of missing persons.”
Professor Dewar up-ended his glass and shook the empty bottle, as if coaxing any reluctant drop he had overlooked. I regarded him somewhat skeptically.
“You wouldn’t believe, Dr. Black,” he said, catching my frown, “how many people in this little country of yours do disappear every year, and many can’t be accounted for in any rational way . . . but this is by no means the end of the story.
“Within days the police called Susan in for questioning, suspecting she’d arranged the abduction of her own child. They knew about the strained relations with her husband. They were also mindful of Susan’s mental state, which they had got from her husband and—most improperly—from a doctor she had been seeing about depression. The officers suggested she had staged the abduction out of malice, a way of getting at her husband. She was released, though advised to seek further psychiatric treatment—this is where I came in. I knew her consultant. He thought I might be able to get through to her.”
“The police don’t sound to have been up to much,” I said. “Accusing the victim. A useless search. How long did they carry out their missing persons enquiry?”
Dewar smiled knowingly.
“Shorter than you’d expect,” he said. “A week or so later they called in Susan again; in fact they arrested her—this time on suspicion of murder.”
“Her mother killed her?” I asked, incredulous.
“That’s what they thought. A man from the village had been walking his dog in the plantation. It got off the lead and ran into a fenced-off section of the woods away from the footpath. When he caught up, the dog was digging underneath some shrubs. It unearthed a body. Emma’s body. The girl had been strangled.”
“And Susan was convicted?” I asked.
“No. Susan was released without charge—eventually. The forensic evidence was problematic. Certainly, the police were incompetent—and that’s putting it mildly. Apart from their cursory search, which was negligent enough, they then overplayed their hand. They were convinced that Susan had psychopathic tendencies. They allowed prejudice to override sober judgment. They assumed in advance she was guilty, then in misguided zeal they tried to railroad the evidence. The detective-inspector in charge was desperate to secure a conviction, having failed to carry out an efficient search. He was suspended and later dismissed from the force. The coroner’s verdict was murder by person, or persons, unknown. The case remains officially unsolved to this day.
“But I’m not so sure. As you know, I’ve spent a lot of time with crimes committed by the insane, and I believe—I believed it at the time—that Susan was capable of murder. The police, maybe, could have secured a conviction: they had a motive and persuasive DNA evidence; but it was rumored that the reason the inspector was sacked, was that he had contrived to lose a maverick DNA sample inconveniently suggesting that the strangulation may have been effected by someone other than Susan.”
It was now past midnight; I was longing for my bed. The professor appeared intent on endlessly spinning a mystery.
“So was it or wasn’t it Susan?”
“As I say, I keep an open mind. But there were classic symptoms. She was becoming deranged, paranoid. And remember, there was an eclipse that day. There are well-documented case histories showing that, as with a full moon, it can push unstably minded people over the edge. Think of all that concentrated gravitational energy when sun, moon, and earth are in alignment!”
Really, this was hard to swallow. I was unclear whether it was meant to be a joke. It occurred to me that Dewar’s account had all along been nothing more than a yarn to idle the night hours away over sherry.
“Are you serious?” I retorted. “This sounds more like Universal Studios!”
“Believe me, Dr. Black,” Dewar laughed, “there are stranger things at Broadmoor than were ever dreamt of in Hollywood.”
“And Susan?” I asked. “What became of her?”
“Tragedy. Daughter murdered. Culprit not found. Arrested by police. Betrayed by her husband. Guilty, perhaps, herself. Who knows what was in her mind? Maybe she did it, yet believed she did not do it. The nursing of contradiction. Guilt and denial—the most lethal of concoctions. It was all too much. Her husband sold up and went off with the secretary—the Old Rectory’s an old people’s home now. Susan was sectioned, confined to a mental hospital, swiftly deteriorated and was eventually diagnosed a paranoid schizophrenic. Neurosis became psychosis—it happens.”
“And is she still confined?” Dewar looked grave.
“No, not anymore, I’m afraid. The following August she took her own life. Leapt from a third story window. The last time I saw her, a week before, she was on another planet. Couldn’t get through at all. She looked strange, too, wasted, aetherial, yet oddly youthful, with a kind of wide-eyed glamour.”
Dewar lent back with an air of finality. It all seemed rather anticlimactic. And where did the supernatural come in? It seemed more like a locked room mystery, or an episode from Ruth Rendell.
“So that’s it?” I asked. “Where’s your ghost?”
“Well, I never said there was a ghost,” he replied; “I merely wished to indicate that there are many inexplicable things in Heaven and Earth.”
“But this . . . apparition. The woman that Emma thought she saw? What was that? Is there any story connected with the place?”
“Oh, a couple of vague rumors. I spoke to this chap Higgins, an old man who used to do the garden for Mrs. Seymour. He said his grandfather once told him something about a hooded figure in white in the plantation. And when the new houses at the back were going up a couple of Irish navvies said they’d seen something passing into the wood one night—but that was probably the drink.
“Anyway,” Professor Dewar laughed, “isn’t this more your line than mine? You’re the archivist. I’m only a scientist!”
Following our conversation I made a mental note to check out the local history, but the matter faded from my mind. There were more pressing priorities, notably the needless refurbishing of the college library, ordered against the advice of scholars and librarians alike by the new director of enterprise and innovation. However, as I shall shortly explain, it was directly due to this mammoth exercise that certain papers came to light that mayhap shed light on the murder of Emma Travers. This is what I meant when I spoke of the operations of chance. However, prior to that there was another fortuitous event, without which I might never even have thought about the case again, and probably not made my discovery amidst the disordered archives.
Rarely do I read university tittle-tattle, but I happened to catch, as I placed a recent copy of The Academic Journal on the open shelves, the name of Professor Dewar. It was, sad to say, an obituary. The professor, during a Canadian lecture tour, had collapsed in the cocktail lounge, after addressing assembled psychiatrists at the University of Regina; evidently prey to an undiagnosed heart complaint. So, as I persevered with my Promethean task, consigning much material to the stack to make
way for computers, my late night chat over sherry with Dewar was very much in mind—as was the provenance of that fine sherry I have never been able to remember the name of, or find again.
An executive decision had been made to store all unpublished pre-nineteenth-century material at a remote site; and it was while shifting these papers that a box came to light. It was in a cupboard blocked by considerable shelving that had been erected over a period I dare not hazard; quite possibly they had rested there unread for a hundred years or more. They pertained to the eighteenth century. The box bore the name of the clergyman then resident at the rectory which later became the Travers’ home—the Reverend Mr. Abshire. Much was dross—old sermons, church accounts, Bible quotations, etcetera—and I contemplated dumping all then and there in the skip. At the bottom of the pile, however, I found a handwritten manuscript. It contained in its title a word that, in the light of the Travers murder, caught my attention—eclipse. I recalled Dewar’s peroration on the phenomenon. The MS’s full title was intriguing: Iniquities & Blasphemies That Did Afflict This Shire At The Time Of The Great Eclipse, In The Year Of Our Lord, 1724.
The Reverend Mr. Abshire was clearly a man of apocalyptic persuasion who saw the Devil’s hand everywhere, and whose opinion of his fellow men followed the less charitable teachings of the Prophets. His account of the supposed consequences of the eclipse smacked more of pagan superstition than Christianity. In the Gog and Magog Hills a calf had been born with two heads. A prize herd of swine had perished after stampeding into a marsh. A baby had died of a baffling ailment at a Grantchester poor house. A man with a pitchfork had run amok in Silver Street. A case of plague had been reported on a remote farm where “did dwell a vile harlot.” Abshire was wont to attribute any and every misfortune to the eclipse. Indeed, it was difficult to tell whether he was raging against the workings of Satan or invoking the righteousness of an angry God.
It was as I reached the end of the MS that I knew my Eureka moment. Abshire concluded with a lengthy description of a calamity that had befallen the family of his predecessor at the rectory, the Reverend Mr. Staines. Abshire’s account, I should add, was dated 1761.
On May 22nd 1724, the day of the total eclipse—the last one visible in England before the twentieth century—six-year-old Mary Staines was abducted from the rectory. Her body was subsequently discovered inexpertly buried in the oak wood at the property’s rear. The perpetrator of the crime was rapidly identified as one Eliza Wilde, who had been employed as a chambermaid at Lathom Hall. The young woman, evidently, had some years before fallen into disgrace after conceiving a child as the result of a romantic liaison with the rector’s eldest son, when she was sixteen years old. To avoid scandal her infant was taken at birth into the Porter household, living there as sibling to its own father; and Eliza was exiled from her scene of shame to a distant house owned by the Lathom family in Cumberland. Several years later, however, she was brought back by the new head of the family, who was selling the northern property and did not wish to dispense with the girl’s efficient service. Once back, she developed an unfortunate habit. At every opportunity she visited the wood so as to watch her own child playing in the rectory garden; doing so by means of a small gap in the wooden gate leading into it, this surreptitious means of scrutiny being adopted in the mistaken belief that she was hidden from view. So great became her importunity—and her mental state so unstable—that, following numerous warnings, she was dismissed, and was thought to have taken up a position in London. Some weeks later she reappeared on the scene and did the awful deed. She preferred to take her own child’s life than see it raised by others. Despite her plight—for she was clearly insane—the court imposed the ultimate penalty. According to Abshire, Eliza Wilde went to the scaffold “with the whites of her eyes rolling most horridly as in a glamour of madness.”
Peter Bell has written articles and stories for All Hallows, The Ghosts & Scholars M. R. James Newsletter, Wormwood, Faunus, and Supernatural Tales; his work has also been published by Ash-Tree Press, Gray Friar Press, Side Real Press, The Scarecrow Press, and Hippocampus Press. He is a historian, a native of Liverpool, an inhabitant of York, and likes to wander the hidden places of Scotland and the North of England. His debut collection, Strange Epiphanies, was published by the Swan River Press in 2012.
When you work with magic, you rapidly realize that it is far easier to disrupt than to create, far more difficult to mend than to destroy.
BIGFOOT ON CAMPUS
Jim Butcher
The campus police officer folded his hands and stared at me from across the table. “Coffee?”
“What flavor is it?” I asked.
He was in his forties, a big, solid man with bags under his calm, wary eyes, and his nametag read DEAN. “It’s coffee-flavored coffee.”
“No mocha?”
“Fuck mocha.”
“Thank God,” I said. “Black.”
Officer Dean gave me hot black coffee in a paper cup, and I sipped at it gratefully. I was almost done shivering. It just came in intermittent bursts now. The old wool blanket Dean had given me was more gesture than cure.
“Am I under arrest?” I asked him.
Officer Dean moved his shoulders in what could have been a shrug. “That’s what we’re going to talk about.”
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“Maybe,” he said in a slow, rural drawl, “you could explain to me why I found you in the middle of an orgy.”
“Well,” I said, “if you’re going to be in an orgy, the middle is the best spot, isn’t it.”
He made a thoughtful sound. “Maybe you could explain why there was a car on the fourth floor of the dorm.”
“Classic college prank,” I said.
He grunted. “Usually when that happens, it hasn’t made big holes in the exterior wall.”
“Someone was avoiding the cliché?” I asked.
He looked at me for a moment, and said, “What about all the blood?”
“There were no injuries, were there?”
“No,” he said.
“Then who cares? Some film student probably watched Carrie too many times.”
Officer Dean tapped his pencil’s eraser on the tabletop. It was the most agitated thing I’d seen him do. “Six separate calls in the past three hours with a Bigfoot sighting on campus. Bigfoot. What do you know about that?”
“Well, kids these days, with their Internets and their video games and their iPods. Who knows what they thought they saw.”
Officer Dean put down his pencil. He looked at me, and said, calmly, “My job is to protect a bunch of kids with access to every means of self-destruction known to man from not only the criminal element but themselves. I got chemistry students who can make their own meth, Ecstasy, and LSD. I got ROTC kids with access to automatic weapons and explosives. I got enough alcohol going through here on a weekly basis to float a battleship. I got a thriving trade in recreational drugs. I got lives to protect.”
“Sounds tiring.”
“About to get tired of you,” he said. “Start giving it to me straight.”
“Or you’ll arrest me?” I asked.
“No,” Dean said. “I bounce your face off my knuckles for a while. Then I ask again.”
“Isn’t that unprofessional conduct?”
“Fuck conduct,” Dean said. “I got kids to look after.”
I sipped the coffee some more. Now that the shivers had begun to subside, I finally felt the knotted muscles in my belly begin to relax. I slowly settled back into my chair. Dean hadn’t blustered or tried to intimidate me in any way. He wasn’t trying to scare me into talking. He was just telling me how it was going to be.
And he drank his coffee old-school.
I kinda liked the guy.
“You aren’t going to believe me,” I said.
“I don’t much,” he said. “Try me.”
“Okay,” I said. “My name is Harry Dresden. I’m a professional wizard.”
Officer Dean p
ursed his lips. Then he leaned forward slightly and listened.
The client wanted me to meet him at a site in the Ouachita Mountains in eastern Oklahoma. Looking at them, you might not realize they were mountains, they’re so old. They’ve had millions of years of wear and tear on them, and they’ve been ground down to nubs. The site used to be on an Indian reservation, but they don’t call them reservations anymore. They’re Tribal Statistical Areas now.
I showed my letter and my ID to a guy in a pickup, who just happened to pull up next to me for a friendly chat at a lonely stop sign on a winding back road. I don’t know what the tribe called his office, but I recognized a guardian when I saw one. He read the letter and waved me through in an even friendlier manner than he had used when he approached me. It’s nice to be welcomed somewhere, once in a while.
I parked at the spot indicated on the map and hiked a good mile and a half into the hills, taking a heavy backpack with me. I found a pleasant spot to set up camp. The mid-October weather was crisp, but I had a good sleeping bag and would be comfortable as long as it didn’t start raining. I dug a fire pit and ringed it in stones, built a modest fire out of fallen limbs, and laid out my sleeping bag on a foam camp pad. By the time it got dark, I was well into preparing the dinner I’d brought with me. The scent of foil-wrapped potatoes baking in coals blended with that of the steaks I had spitted and roasting over the fire.
Can I cook a camp meal or what?
Bigfoot showed up half an hour after sunset.
One minute, I was alone. The next, he simply stepped out into view. He was huge. Not huge like a big person, but huge like a horse, with that same sense of raw animal power and mass.
He was nine feet tall at least and probably tipped the scales at well over six hundred pounds. His powerful, wide-shouldered body was covered in long, dark brown hair. Even though he stood in plain sight in my firelight, I could barely see the buckskin bag he had slung over one shoulder and across his chest, the hair was so long.
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, 2013 Edition Page 27