Tabitha slipped into the demon’s memory, eons before she was born. She found herself consumed by the sensation of wind whipping past her face. A naked man’s limp body soared through open sky, speeding downward. Bound tightly to his forearm, a small wooden shield with stretched leather bore the sigil for protection. The ground rushed to cradle his falling body. At his side, wings flailed, trying to slow his descent. A wave of dust spit into the air as he lodged into the dry riverbed.
Tears pooled in his eyes until they spilled over, running down the sides of his head. The warrior’s fall caused the bedrock to crack, lines stretching outward from his body in a pattern like giant veins. The man arched his body, forcing himself to sit upright, spitting blood onto his bare chest. Attached to his back mangled wings pulled themselves free from the riverbed. Though he may have once appeared angelic, now, all that remained was a broken man.
He sobbed as his wings twitched, useless. A shadow stepped between him and the sun, casting him into darkness. Hands from the shadow grabbed at the wings and wrenched, tearing them from the man’s flesh with a wet sucking sound. His cries kicked up another storm of dust in every direction.
Wrapping its hands around his neck, the shadow lifted the man into the air. Radiating from the unknown figure’s fingers, strands of black goo worked their way under the wingless man’s skin, spreading until it reached his face. Thin lines of black pushed through his veins, pushing them to the surface until they looked like war paint.
The shadow leaned into the fallen angel’s face, close enough for him to make out serpent like eyes. As the black liquid robbed the man’s skin of color the shadow hissed, “We are now Murmur.” The bones in the angel’s jaw cracked, separating, elongating until it resembled a wild dog.
“Levi cum praesidio!”
Tabitha fell backward, black goo clinging to her hands. A burst of light slammed into the demon, sending it reeling. The beast was like every demon before it, an infection determined to spread. Another blast of light erupted in the room, striking the demon in the torso. Unlike the first, this hardly made the demon flinch.
Tabitha turned, motioning the girls to flee. Rena pulled at Abigail’s arm, screaming for her to run. The demon dashed past her, sprinting toward the Ouija board. Abigail shouted one last time.
“Valerie, terminate--”
The orb above Abigail exploded in a flash of light, forcing Tabitha to cover her eyes. As the room returned to its dismal state, Abigail remained standing, blinking at the empty spot on the wall. Rena fished her flashlight from her pocket, smacking it until it projected a steady beam.
“We’re getting out of here right now.”
Abigail. The memories were fuzzy, as if they were just out of reach. The infant’s eyes staring at her from the hallway leading into their kitchen. The pink shirt with a unicorn drawn on it always amused her. More time had passed than she imagined. More than a decade, but she took solace in the strong young witch her daughter had become.
“My mom said you were going to be trouble,” Rena chided.
Without the board luring them in, ghosts moved away from the auditorium, acting as if the demon had never existed. Tabitha approached her daughter, wishing she had a chance to say goodbye to her one remaining legacy.
The blue of her arms dimmed, an indication she would need to find a remnant before the night ended. She placed her hand on the girl’s chest, directly over her heart. The girl’s eyes remained unfocused, staring off into space as Rena tugged at her arm. The young witch rested her hand on top of Tabitha’s ghostly fingers.
Abigail’s eyes focused on Tabitha. A smile spread across her daughter’s lips, tears falling from the corners of her eyes. A rush of tiny whispers filled the room until they reached a dull roar. Abigail’s voice deepened. “We too, are Murmur, momma,” she whispered. Tabitha staggered backward, catching a glimpse at her own hands still covered in the goo. Thin black lines pumped in her veins just beneath the skin.
Pulped
James A. Moore
The first victim had been hit so hard in the face his lips were torn off, leaving a bloody grin in their place. Three bodies, each of them beaten to death. When I say beaten, I mean hammered until bones were broken and the faces were completely unrecognizable. Me and my partner, Dominick Galliano, were the lucky bastards that caught the case.
Fifty years ago The Benson was a decent little pub that catered to the growing Irish population in the area. It also took care of the working stiffs coming back from the factories along Washington Street. These days it was a dive that only the worst sort of people frequented. The wood of the walls was rotting in a few places, the floors were just as bad, and stained with enough spilled drinks to guarantee sticky shoes. It had lost a lot of its charm over the decades. Seeing a beating, a rape or a drug bust take place in the vicinity was common enough, but you didn’t have to worry too often about murders. Most of the clientele was too wasted on heroin to actually get into fights.
So seeing the corpses and the condition of the bar was a bit more unsettling than I’d expected. Dom squatted next to the closest corpse, his face scrunched up in an expression of disgust and horror. Whoever had hit the deceased had actually shattered his face. It was the wrong shape and parts were dangling free that shouldn’t have been.
“I’m going with either brass knuckles or a meat tenderizing hammer.” Dom did not touch, but he looked carefully and took pictures with his phone.
“Seriously?” I could see the mess, but not all of the details. The bar was too dark and the forensics team wasn’t around just yet.
“There are marks on the bone, scraped the meat and the bone away in one punch.”
I let out a whistle without really thinking about it. The force involved was heavy, like a golden gloves contender. When you added in the brass, it was a hard beat down. I was figuring a crime of passion, only it was done to three men and all of them were the sort that specialized in delivering the beatings rather than taking them.
There were still three people in the place that were alive, aside from Dom and me. Two of them were sleeping off their latest high, so wasted they couldn’t even move, though it was possible they were actually awake. The last one was the manager of The Benson, a creep named Jeff Lemon, who kept avoiding arrest because no one could ever find him with any drugs in the place. Druggies? Absolutely. Narcotics? Only on the people he served and never on the premises and never on the bartender.
Dom kept looking at the bodies, careful not to touch. While he was busy with that, I walked over to talk to Lemon. The man shook his head and said, “I didn’t see anything.”
“Yeah, because that’s gonna play out here.”
Dom called out, “First victim looks to be Dan Chaney.” I looked over and he pointed to the massive ring on the corpse’s middle finger. It was a genuine imitation gold nugget that had dented more than one forehead over the years. Chaney wouldn’t be caught dead without it. He was still wearing it, proving my point.
I looked back at Lemon. “We playing this game?” We’d gone to school together. We’d never been friends. Jeff Lemon hung out with the druggies even then and I was a jock. I’d probably thumped his head against the wall a dozen times back in the day and I could tell by the look he was giving me that he remembered every time we’d caught each other the wrong way.
“I didn’t see anything.”
“Don’t be stupid.” I’m not above using intimidation to close a case. I loomed over Lemon and stared hard into his eyes. That was normally enough to get him talking.
Not this time. He stood his ground, which was not at all like the Lemon I’d known for twenty-odd years.
There was a reason for that, of course, but it took me a while to realize what it was.
When we were done at the scene and the forensics guys were going over the whole place, the two of us headed for the office. By that point, Lemon had been released and allowed to go home. He’d have the next few days off, because I intended to keep the crime scene
barricaded for as long as possible. He inconvenienced me and I returned the favor. The two sleeping beauties had been incarcerated, and Dom was yawning so much I expected his face to crack.
It was during the drive that I realized Lemon wasn’t growing a backbone. He was still scared. Whatever he’d seen, whoever had done the murders, scared him a lot more than I did and he didn’t think I could protect him.
* * *
Nice surprise. Jeff Lemon actually had security footage in his piece of shit bar. There were four cameras, all of them with VHS connections instead of digital, but it was still a lucky break. My old pal didn’t much want to give the tapes without a search warrant, but I convinced him. I wound up getting a warrant, because I like doing the paperwork, but I made sure Jeff remembered to be afraid of me. My grandfather and my father both worked this job. Being a cop runs deep in my family. I learned the loopholes from them. Sometimes you need to make sure the perpetrators you run across stay honest with you.
Dom looked over the tapes. He was always better with that sort of thing. He liked staring at blurry images. Meanwhile, I followed up with our two junkies, both of whom actually did sleep through the murders, and I talked to the M.E. about the murders. The woman I talked to was strictly business, and young enough to be my daughter. Hannah Lindsey was round, had black wire hair that she managed to beat into submission with a lot of hair gel and normally was as cheerful as a pissed off badger. Not that she was ever rude, really, but she could have taken lessons on smiling.
“All three of the victims were hit at least twenty times apiece, and look to have been beaten with brass knuckles or a similar weapon. If they were knuckles, they were custom jobs. The markings aren’t familiar with any of the brands we have on file, and we have everything on file.”
Those words were innocent enough, but I felt a cold dread sneak up my back and nest in my stomach.
“Custom? What sort of markings?”
Hannah showed me a photo from her digital files. It was a close-up on one of the markings. The indentations drove deep, as I had been warned, but the flesh was torn so looking for the exact shape of the knuckle tips was challenging. I ran my finger just across the surface of her iPad screen and asked, “Is that a skull?”
“Yes. But look here.” Hannah moved to the next picture in line, her dark brown eyes half hidden behind her thick lenses. Still, I could see the slight shimmer of excitement. This was something out of the routine and when you get down to it, after a while we all want to see something new. The next photo was another extreme close-up of a wound. This time the design was different, a crescent moon shape that had been hammered into brutalized flesh. Before I could say anything she threw up another image, this one more obscure. It took me a second to see the shape of a cat arching its back and hissing.
The chill came back again. Only this time it was different; there was a layer of excitement, too.
“Let me guess. Last one is a Jack O’ lantern?”
Hannah pinned me with her gaze. “How did you know?”
“Back in the day, there was a pulp character that had special markings on brass knuckles. He was one of those guys like Doc Savage, or The Shadow. There was a radio show, printed stories. There were even a few movies, but almost no one has copies.”
“Really? What was he called?” She actually sounded interested, which was amusing. Most of the women I mentioned this stuff to had their eyes glaze over in thirty seconds or less.
“Doctor Samuel Hanes, also known as The Black Wraith.” Nostalgia tugged at me. Unlike most everyone I knew I’d seen the old movies. I’d read all of the books. When I was growing up The Black Wraith was my hero as surely as Batman was.
“Never heard of him.”
“Like I said, not as popular as some of the others.” I shrugged. “They all had their gimmicks, right? The Shadow could see into the hearts of men. Doc Savage was basically the earthbound version of Superman. He was from Earth but had been raised and trained to be as close to superhuman as he could be. The Spider pretended to be a criminal and wore a ring that left spider-shaped marks on his victims’ faces. The Black Wraith was supposed to have been shot dead but came back on Halloween night to offer up justice from beyond the grave. Had special guns that were oversized and in one story used a Tommy gun. Then the movies came along and the brass knuckles got added. They’d have close ups of his fists in their black gloves, each knuckle with a different Halloween thing on it.”
“How do you even know about that?”
I smiled at her. “I watched them all growing up. They were kind of awesome.”
Turned out Hannah was a fan of the old pulps, so I wrote down some of the few websites that had pictures of the old costume for the Black Wraith and she was good enough to email me the pictures and file information on the dead men.
Me? I kept playing it out in my head, imagining the Black Wraith going on a rampage. One of the things I always loved about the old stories was that they were lurid. They gave graphic descriptions of the way the Wraith hit people and the sort of damage he did. In the stories he really was a ghost, but he had a body. They always made that clear. He was dead, but when the sun came up he could hide in plain sight and he did that by becoming Doctor Sam Hanes. Sam Hanes. Samhain. Halloween. Get it? A silly and very likely tongue in cheek comment from the creator of the Black Wraith.
I read an interview where he talked about the creation of the character and how he’d almost called him the Halloween Man or Doctor Halloween. I never did find out why he changed his mind, but the motif stayed. In the early stories he wore a homemade skull mask. Later he wore a black mask and the brass knuckles. He always wore a tattered cape and a fedora. He originally used smoke bombs to make his getaways and to fight the bad guys, but later he summoned a heavy fog and fought against people who could barely see their own faces through the haze.
In the serials it was always dry ice.
When I got back to the department I showed the pictures to Dom and watched carefully for his reaction. At first he frowned, and his brow got tight. “This a joke, Billy?”
“Not even a little.”
“You tell anyone else about it?”
“I mentioned the movies, but no. No one else knows.”
Dom nodded and lowered his chin to his chest as he examined the pictures again. I looked at him as he did it. He studied the scene and I studied him. Dark, curly hair, dark eyes, a chiseled jaw line. One of the first things I ever said to him was he looked like Bruce Wayne. He laughed it off. He had a perfect laugh and perfect teeth. He looked like a Hollywood leading man. He still does.
Turns out it runs in the family. Back in the day, as he told me one night over drinks, his great-grandfather had worked in Hollywood. Bit parts in about a dozen movies, normally where he played the best friend or competition of the leading man, but for a short time, he’d made a better name for himself playing a pulp age hero.
For the length of time it took to make four serials and three actual movies, his great-grandfather, the pulp writer that had created the Black Wraith, also played him on the silver screen. There was no budget for the stuff and Anthony Galliano, also known as the pulp writer Walter Slade, took on the name Blake Hadley and became an actor. He made decent enough money. He made the same sort of scratch for his stories.
Dom never talked much about what happened, but there was some sort of Hollywood scandal and before the dust had settled he’d retired to Massachusetts and a different life entirely. Low-level politics, mostly.
Dom loved the fact that his family had a celebrity but, whatever the scandal was, it was bad enough that he didn’t talk about it and he almost never spoke about his great-grandfather.
There was a time he thought about going to Hollywood himself, but it never happened.
He turned his eyes toward me and studied me. I mean studied me like I was a perp. He looked worried. Genuinely worried and I couldn’t understand why.
“What’s up, Dom?”
“I need you to co
me with me, partner, and I need to show you something.” He didn’t really ask, but he rose from his desk seat and started for the exit we always used.
I followed him and frowned.
“Dom, seriously, what is going on?”
“I need to show you. I need a witness, okay?”
A witness? I just nodded.
“Did you see anything on the tapes, Dom?” I spoke as we walked from the building.
“I’ll show them to you. What we got is nothing. I mean, I can see the guys getting beaten, but there isn’t a person doing it to them.”
“Come again?”
“No one is in the images, Bill. No one. Just some weird distortions.”
Three miles down the road from the station was the house where Dom had lived his entire life. His parents owned it before him (and they would have had it still if they hadn’t decided to move to Florida and hang around Disneyworld) and before them his grandparents and before them his great-grandparents. Four generations in the same place. It was a damned nice house; I’d have stayed, too. Dom’s place was an old Victorian with lots of gingerbread, a widow’s walk, and half an acre of land. He inherited the house but I knew he was paying someone to keep the place looking good for him. Dom is a certified slob.
Not much had changed since the first time I’d been there. That was right after Dom told me about his great-grandfather’s books and movies and showed me the collection he had.
The films were in decent shape. Parts of the old celluloid had buckled and crumbled but Dom managed to get all of the stuff put onto DVDs and later onto Blu-Rays and he’d settled us in the room set aside with a dozen theater seats where we’d watched the first of the serials.
We went right to the same room again, but instead of smiling as he entered, Dom frowned, his face set in a brooding expression I seldom saw on him. It added years.
Wicked Haunted: An Anthology of the New England Horror Writers Page 30