by Ivan Blake
Back Cover
Who knew the dead have more to fear from the living than the living have to fear from the dead? Certainly not seventeen-year-old Chris Chandler, not before his family moved to Bemishstock, Maine in the autumn of 1985.
His father’s job is to close plants for Allied Paper Products of Wisconsin. Bemishstock is his fourth crumbling town in six years, and each one has resented and harassed the Chandlers more hatefully than the previous. Even Chris will admit that his family’s odyssey across America has turned him into a lonely, brooding nutcase, and he has only survived the soul-sucking experience by remaining virtually invisible.
Then suddenly one day, after a couple of totally stupid mistakes, Chris finds himself trapped between two nightmarish forces—a grave robber and a vengeful demon—and like the cemetery guardians of old, he must defeat both or end up a corpse himself and cursed for all eternity.
Dead Scared© 2017 by Ivan Blake
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, or events, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
MuseItUp Publishing
https://museituppublishing.com
Cover Art © 2017 by Charlotte Volnek
Layout and Book Production by Lea Schizas
Print ISBN: 978-1-77127-940-6
eBook ISBN: 978-1-77127-941-3
First eBook Edition *October 2017
For my mother Mildred and my granddaughter Madelyn
Acknowledgements
I’m deeply indebted to my parents who instilled in me a passion for the written word. I’m grateful to my sons Christopher and Timothy who loved ghost stories as children and urged me to one day write mine down. And above all I’m grateful to my wife Heather who prodded me at just the right time when she said, “If you were meant to write, you’d be writing,” and then edited this book innumerable times in her unstinting support of my efforts.
Dead Scared
The Mortsafeman: Book 1
Ivan Blake
MuseItUp Publishing
www.museituppublishing.com
Nuper defuncti tumulum cum polluerint prius reddidit Creatori suo tempore plenitudinis, de qua prius carnis fabricatus est in terram, et ira est ad cor dolor in paradiso Dei secundum animam.
—from De Sanctitate Sepulchro et protectione mortuis, 1453
Emansus de Geisteborg
Defiling the grave of the recently departed, before the Creator in the fullness of His own time has returned the flesh to the dust from whence He crafted it, is to bring pain to the soul of the departed in Paradise and rage to the Heart of God.
—from On the Sanctity of the Grave and the Protection of the Dead, 1453
Emansus of Geisteborg
Chapter One
1986
August
Every kid in Maine’s South Portland Youth Detention Center was fighting some kind of demon. Christopher Chandler’s demon was different; she always drew blood.
Past ten on a sticky summer night, the heavy air off the land, ripe with the smell of rotten eggs from the pulp mills and fish waste from the canning plant, no one could sleep. Two hundred boys, tossing in their beds, whispering, up to god knows what; it all made for a low, irksome hum across the complex, like flies on filth.
Chris was alone in the library, reading. One of the perks of being labelled deeply troubled and dangerous—he had lots of time to himself. He heard the door open, close, and then...nothing. After a minute, he called out, “Need help?” No reply. Still, he sensed someone watching from the stacks, and twice glimpsed movement out of the corner of his eye. He knew too well where this was going.
Fifteen, maybe twenty minutes passed before he heard another sound, then footsteps, and the lights went out. “You don’t have to do this,” Chris said. Again, no reply.
Sighing, he pushed several books into a ratty canvas bag, and stood up. Straightening as best he could, he hobbled away toward the library door, past the darkened stacks, with only the red glow of the exit sign to light the way.
“Running away, motherfucker?”
Chris stopped, bowed his head, and after a moment turned around. A pimply kid, maybe fifteen, tall, wiry, and sweating like a pig, stepped from the shadows. Chris didn’t recognise the new arrival; they all had to learn.
“You’re the one who’s been hiding, not me,” Chris said. “You scared?”
“No, asshole, I’m not scared! But if you ain’t, you should be!” The kid was practically shouting; nerves most likely.
“Keep it down…unless you want the guards to come.” Then Chris smiled. “The idiots in Unit C put you up to this?”
“Nobody put me up to nothing. They say you’re tough, but you look fuckin’ sick to me.” The kid was jumpy, shuffling about like he had to take a leak, and swinging a sock filled with something heavy over and over against the palm of his left hand.
“You are frightened!” Chris almost felt sorry for the kid. “First night in here, figure you’ve got to let people know you’re a real tough bastard, let them know not to mess with you. They tell you, get Chandler, and you say, sure...because you’re just that stupid.”
“Shut the fuck up! We gonna do this...or you too much of a pussy?”
“All right. First though, you have to know how this will end.” Chris lowered his voice and moved toward the boy. “You’re going to get hurt. I wish that wasn’t true, but it is. You’re going to get hurt so bad that for the rest of your time in here you’re going to be the Unit C cuddle bunny; you’re going to bend over for every horny idiot who takes a fancy to your scrawny ass.” He moved closer still. “You’ll be so messed up you won’t be able to say no to nothing and to nobody ever again.” Chris smiled, waited for the images to sink in then shook his head. “But if that’s what you want...”
“You don’t frighten me. You can’t even walk straight for fuck sake.”
“Okay then, but I do have to say,” and Chris stepped right up to the kid, took him in his arms, kissed him repeatedly on his pockmarked and pimply cheek, and said, “Better you than me for a change.”
“Get off me!” The kid shoved Chris away. “Damn, you really are sick!”
“Yes, I probably am…and so is she.” The air crackled.
“What?”
Chris pointed over the kid’s shoulder, up toward the ceiling. “Say hi to Mallory.”
The boy spun around and screamed—screamed like he’d lost his mind—as his left ear and a strip of scalp were torn away and tossed across the room to strike the far wall with a bloody splat.
October
With all the mess on his desk, Martin Koyman might never have noticed the brown envelope had he not dropped a breakfast bagel right in the middle of it. And he only realized the envelope was still sealed when he tried to scrape the cream cheese back onto the bagel. Nothing on Koyman’s desk was sealed, not credit card bills, not the many threatening letters from collection agencies, not the letters from his wife’s lawyer, not even pay stubs. Koyman’s life was an open book, a crappy, two-bit soap opera of a book, but an open book all the same. So what was a sealed envelope doing there?
Six a.m. and the newsroom of the Bangor Daily Courier was almost empty. Koyman called across the room to the only other person in at that ridiculous hour. “Jackie, you put an envelope on my desk?” Jackie Cormier was a journalism intern from the University of Maine assigned to help Koyman with his investigations.
“What envelope?” she yelled back from the kitchenette as
she scraped the accumulated crud out of her mug. On its side, the mug read Rats, Plankton, Viruses, Interns in descending order.
“You see anybody near my desk this morning?”
“Not since I got here.” Jackie filled the mug with cold coffee from last night’s pot, nuked it, and started across the newsroom toward Koyman.
Nothing on the envelope except Koyman’s name in green marker—no return address, no business logo, nothing. He ripped it open and shook out the contents; several wrinkled pages of hand-written notes, torn apparently from a ring binder, smudged with soot, holed by cinders and singed at the edges. He tossed the envelope onto an overloaded waste basket, took a bite of bagel and a mouthful of lukewarm coffee from a paper cup, rocked back in his chair, and began to read aloud the charred notes.
....such appalling specimens and this is the worst one yet. The corpse was already in bad shape when it arrived at the funeral parlor because the deceased had been sitting in front of her television for a week before anyone found her. When Brewster’s idiot son was burying her, he managed to put the spade right through her chest. Then another week went by after the funeral before I could reopen the grave, during which time the spring rain made a real mess of her. The cheap box old man Brewster switched for the family’s expensive casket afforded little protection from the damp...illegible writing...probably caused some of the damage myself when I pulled her up through the splintered lid. But the worst challenge was her size. Florence Bloss was a giant slug of a woman.
Even so, I attached my Sacro-occipital Activator and applied a rotation fifteen degrees beyond the normal...text burned away... the neck snapped in a most satisfying fashion and I went looking for damage to the vertebral arteries.
Because of the condition of the cadaver, the head wouldn’t come away easily. As I tried to peel the skin from the neck up toward the chin...text burned away...windpipe was clogged with mud and debris that had washed into the grave...illegible...bow saw from my woodpile to finish the job so the edges of the neck were ragged. All the same, the vertebral arteries were easy to locate.
Text burned away...the arteries at the level of the first and second vertebrae so that’s where I started looking for the telltale accumulation of fluid in the basilar wall. And that’s where I found it, a subarachnoid tear extending into the...illegible.
So another failure; I’m fairly confident that the tear this time was not the result of any flaw in my Activator, however, but rather because of the unusually thin arterial walls in this grotesque lump...illegible...have to find a better specimen for my next....
“What the hell?”
“That’s so gross!” Jackie rolled a chair alongside Koyman’s desk and sat down. “Sounds like some guy’s chopping up bodies.”
“Christ! I know what this is about!” Koyman sat up excitedly. “There’s got to be more, some kind of explanation or context or something.” He waved his bagel toward the garbage can. “Check the envelope again.”
Jackie fished the manila envelope from atop the heaped-up paper cups and Styrofoam lunch containers in Koyman’s wastebasket, and looked inside.
“Yup, a piece of paper stuck at the bottom.” Jackie pulled it out, unfolded it, and said, “Typed. No signature.”
“Okay, read it to me.”
Mr. Koyman,
You covered the trial of Christopher Chandler. Do you think the judge would have been so quick to convict if she’d seen these pages? I have reason to believe the Bemishstock Police have the binder from which these pages were torn and deliberately withheld it from Chandler’s lawyer. When you ask them about the notes, you may also want to ask why they told no one about the other human remains they found in the ashes of the barn—the unidentified remains. And when you show the family of Florence Bloss these notes, I expect they will insist her grave be reopened. So eventually people are going to find out what really happened in Bemishstock—even if they don’t want to know.
“Christopher Chandler…the boy who killed the old man in Bemishstock last year, right?” Jackie asked as she handed the note to Koyman.
“Right.”
“I remember his picture on TV. Really good looking kid, tall, slim, long blond hair, and those grey eyes…”
“And that’s what you remember about the trial, how Chandler looked?”
“No….no of course not.” Jackie blushed, and picked up the charred notes from Martin’s desk.
“Well, I remember Chandler didn’t look quite so good in court,” Martin said. “Somebody had beaten the shit out of him before his trial. He was a wreck. I wondered if the police might have done it. Only mention of his injuries was that he’d been hurt the night the old man died. But that was weeks before the trial.”
“And these pages, are they supposed to be the old man’s notes?”
“Somebody wants us to think that. Meath his name was. Some kind of quack doctor.”
“So if Meath was stealing bodies, chopping them up, and writing notes about it, then why didn’t that come up at the Chandler boy’s trial?”
“Because maybe he wasn’t. Maybe these pages are fake. Maybe whoever sent them is hoping to use us to get Chandler’s case re-opened. And yet…”
“And yet what?”
“And yet, during the trial, I had a feeling the real story wasn’t coming out. It seemed like everyone—the prosecution, the cops, even Chandler’s lawyer—like they were all in on some secret they didn’t want the rest of us to know.”
“So maybe we should have another go at them?”
“What, you’re not enjoying Bangor city politics?” Koyman said with a grin. “Okay, so perhaps we should.” He grabbed a scrap of paper from his desk and started scribbling a list of to-dos. “We’ll start with the old doctor. Meath got a pass during the trial. Just a sad old man, or so everybody thought, but these notes say different. Then we’ll look at the kid again; for some reason, the whole town and especially the police hated Chandler’s guts long before the fire. Why was that?”
“The note says the Bemishstock Police withheld information about remains found in the fire,” Jackie said. “Could I maybe talk to the pathologist’s office?”
“Okay.”
“And this Florence Bloss, you know that name?”
“Nope.”
“So, can I check her out too?”
“I do remember this one teacher,” Koyman said. “On the stand, he said something about Chandler telling the truth even if no one wanted to hear it. The truth about what, he never said. I tried to talk to the teacher, but he disappeared. We should try to find him. Back then, I thought the only story was how much the police hated Chandler, how they didn’t seem at all objective about the case. The Chief talked like the kid was Satan incarnate. Then the judge found him guilty and I figured that was that.”
“But maybe not.”
“No, maybe not. So, we take a month, do some digging, and see what we turn up.”
“Starting with the police?”
“Hell, no,” Koyman said. “We want to be well prepared when we sit down with Chief Gabriel Boucher. He’s not going to stonewall us this time.” Koyman clapped Jackie on the back, grinned, and added, “Young lady, I think your work term just got a helluva lot more interesting.”
November
“Koyman’s here, Chief, with some girl,” Deputy Ricky Pike said.
So now they were ganging up on him. “Tell them they’ll bloody well have to wait; I’m gonna be busy for a bit,” the Chief replied. “They can get coffee at Molly’s. I want to go through the case file one more time before they start in with their questions.”
Chief Gabriel Boucher—Gabe to his friends—of the Bemishstock Police Department had been on the force for thirteen years, five as its Chief. An ex-Army Ranger, he was now horribly out of shape from whisky and painkillers, and paranoid as hell due to the many secrets in his private and professional lives he was trying so hard to keep.
Koyman from the Bangor paper had phoned a week earlier to ask for the interv
iew for a follow-up article on the Chandler trial. Koyman said he only wanted to clarify a few points. Like Gabe believed that. He could read Koyman like a book. The goddamned reporter had covered the Chandler trial from start to finish. He was short, fat, sweaty, and judging by his accent, probably a fuckin’ New York Jew—and the asshole was up to something, of that Gabe was certain.
Chief Gabriel Boucher firmly believed locals weren’t to blame for the sorry state of their town; all the goddamned outsiders were. The scam artists, the drug dealers, and the coloreds, all the wetbacks, and the big business phonies, and the goddamned down-state politicians, they were to blame. Martin Koyman was just one more in a long line of scum come to suck the last dregs of decency out of Bemishstock.
Koyman’s questions during the Chandler trial had really gotten under Gabe’s skin:
“Chief Boucher, is it true your men persecuted Chandler for weeks before the fire?”
“Is it true your officers never looked at any other suspects, even though cases of arson and vandalism in Bemishstock go back years?”
Koyman was a fuckin’ guest in Bemishstock! That’s not how guests were supposed to behave. Boucher could have popped the bastard.
Chief Boucher was proud of the job his officers had done in keeping chaos at bay in their crumbling town. And he was especially proud of the job they’d done in nailing the Chandler kid. Justice had been served, even if the sentence hadn’t been as severe as the town expected. Had Koyman and the Bangor paper given his officers their due? No bloody way. And now Koyman was back with more questions. Boucher knew from painful experience that a goddamned reporter could find scandal in the Lord’s Prayer if he had a mind to—and Koyman apparently had a mind to.
Boucher opened the file. It had been sitting on his desk for days; he’d been thinking of little else since Koyman called.