Dark & Disorderly

by Bernita Harris

  “So everything was a test?” I disliked the bleak note hollowing my voice. “Thank you so much. What a peculiar way to certify talent, Sergeant. Seduction as part of your job description.”

  He didn’t respond. He just stood there like a great stone block, staring at me, his aura a hard band.

  Funny thing was, I actually did believe him. Not that it helped my ego any. He hadn’t tried to pick up where he’d left off, hadn’t pushed the physical, had accepted that no meant no. Further, he was offering me an out, no matter what came down regarding Nathan. Federal status carried protection and a future beyond the murky, miserable present.

  “Here you are,” he said coolly. I snatched my dangling keys from his fingers. “Now, will you have a coffee with me and let me explain details and discuss contract terms or do you intend to run off and pout?”

  Right there, I nearly became a case of spontaneous human combustion. Squeezing my eyes shut and sucking in my bottom lip so hard I nearly bit it, I fought to tamp down and control an unaccustomed rush of primal rage, so strong I felt nearly incandescent with it. To contain all the bad words I wanted to say. It wasn’t easy. It must have shown, for when I was able to focus again, he’d eased back a few feet, eyes narrowed, hands loose.

  Pout? A mind-game word. Either he’d chosen it deliberately to get me to agree, or he was an unconscionable asshole. I didn’t think he was—not a total one anyway. I’d be a fool to turn the offer down…

  Common sense almost swallowed pride and outrage—but not quite. I jacked up each corner of my mouth in an artificial semblance of a smile and looked him up and down slowly and deliberately. Equally slowly, his iron jaw tightened and his ears reddened.

  “This proposition is the official business you yammered about? Thank you so much, but you can stick your federal job. No doubt, it would include working with you. The prospect of closer association with you does not entice me. Call it pout or petulance or what ever you damn well please, but I will not be manhandled and manipulated and browbeaten. Not again. Been there, done that. Not ever again.” I slammed shut the car door and turned my back on him to stomp around to the driver’s side. To hell with him.

  32.

  Of course, I cut my turn short and jammed my tires along the cement divider when I pulled out. He stood with his hands on his hips shaking his head. Only my guardian’s early training in deportment prevented me from giving him the finger.

  Two blocks farther on I pulled in at the elementary school, parked out of sight behind the building and dug the work file from the backseat. He’d pooh-poohed it, so I would do it. Fog be damned and Johnny Thresher be damned and federal agencies be damned. Cases here were just as important as anywhere else.

  Six addresses. Three near the Old Town center, just off Main on Oak Street, a street of imposing old houses, built mostly of red brick in the high Victorian style with turrets and cupolas and odd little balconies. According to Ted, the street once went by the local name of “Pill Alley” because several doctors had lived on it at various times over the years. The other three scattered around town. At least I could drive by and settle the locations in my mind. I had to do something besides seethe. God, I was stupid to think for a minute his interest had been anything but professional.

  Each address included a précis of the resident entity and its activities. By and large a pretty mundane and innocuous lot of ephemeral forms: four little girls shrieking and giggling while they played musical chairs to the sound of an invisible piano; an old woman with a kerosene lamp in a long, old-fashioned flannel nightdress, wandering upstairs halls and opening and closing bedroom doors; a soldier in uniform circa WWI, his arm in a sling, writing a letter, standing at a library window and pacing restlessly about the room.

  The stories manufactured to explain and amplify each apparition, however, were both dramatic and sentimental. All three were clearly of the recorder ghost variety and harmless to observers. No demonic or poltergeistic activity suggested. No levitating lamps, flying teacups, falling paintings or leaping plant stands that might be aimed at unwary observers. No problem there. A rather charming selection, I thought.

  The next three were not quite as sedate and civilized, and decidedly more media res. A kitchen in a Chinese restaurant in the east end, now closed, where the cook had taken a meat cleaver to his waitress wife. Claimed to be audio only, with grunts, curses, sounds of struggle and shrieks of terror as she tried to escape, but with a bloodstain that couldn’t be erased blotting the floor by the swinging door.

  Aficionados of the paranormal would also be treated to a ghostly and ghastly form of more recent vintage: one climbing stairs, fashioning a slipknot and swinging from the railing of the arty loft in an empty house. The widow of the suicide was obviously not averse to lending her property to assist the tourism industry. These two were also standard recorder specters. The only danger to onlookers might be an attack of acute nausea. Perhaps I should suggest barf bags as a safety feature.

  The last site, an apartment house undergoing renovation, purported to display a blood-spattered male apparition, who, carrying a bloody knife, wandered regularly through the front hall and foyer—the ghost of a murderer. According to the presentation, a few years ago the ravished body of a young woman had been found strangled and mutilated in shrubbery nearby. In addition, intrepid visitors could engage the ghost in macabre conversation between his bouts of confessional babble and shouted rants about women.

  Not difficult to understand why the apartment house was empty and undergoing renovation. The owners must have considerable difficulty keeping tenants. Particularly female ones. On the other hand, it was also possible that the disturbance of the renovations themselves had triggered the apparition.

  I saw no profound need to inspect the other sites, but this last one gave me pause. I felt surprised I hadn’t been tasked with eliminating this entity, but perhaps the bloody specter represented a recent appearance. Quite possible, considering the intensity of the times. Bobby had mentioned the rape/murder of a young woman in this part of town as one of their cold case files. They had never caught her killer. However, no reports of an apparition—hers or her killer’s—had surfaced before to my knowledge. If this specter was identified, the case could be quietly closed.

  Not a nice ghost. Possibly a malignant one. Interactives were called that for a reason. One had tried to trip me down a flight of very steep stairs not that long ago.

  In fairness to the applicants, I would have to check it out. Even so, I would definitely recommend this location be removed from the Walk. In fact, I’d demand it. I should probably exorcise the beastly thing out of hand to avoid the dangerous possibility of a re-enactment of his crime on some unsuspecting tourist. Immediately.

  Seventeen Riverview Avenue, near the bridge. I remembered the building, a grand, sprawling three-story place with a red mansard roof, sold and converted to pricy flats when the original family fell on hard times. A friend of his, Nathan had once mentioned airily, leased one of the six or eight spacious apartments there. I stopped playing with my bracelets and turned the ignition.

  The apartment house sported a semicircular carriage drive. A brown van with Roger’s Plumbing and Heating emblazoned on the side, a row of cast-iron radiators and a blue dumpster overflowing with rolls of old carpet like bent cardboard tubes, lathe and drywall and other renovation residue occupied the space in front of the building. I pulled in under the spreading branches of one of a pair of towering horse chestnuts, their blossom spikes gleaming faintly in the mist like spirit candelabra, and parked gingerly behind the dumpster.

  Lights shone from grilled basement windows, crept from behind drapes in first-floor casements and spewed from the central entry. Another small and leprous cast-iron radiator served to prop open one of the wide double doors below the leaded Tiffany fan light. As I climbed the broad steps, I noted the design in the glass above the doors included lilies in art nouveau style. Or art deco. I always confused the two. I squared my shoulders, adjuste
d my bracelets and stepped inside past the row of mailboxes in the foyer and into the square central hall.

  A large metal-strapped container on a pallet crushed the dirty red carpet and blocked the stairs to the second floor. A new heating unit waiting to be installed, I assumed. A coil of copper tubing looped over the bottom newel post. On either side of the two apartment doors, sections of dull sheet-metal ductwork leaned like slender sarcophagi against the walnut wainscoting of both walls. The hall smelled of pine sawdust, wet plaster, oil and steel.

  From the back and below, through an open door beyond the staircase, came the rhythmic bang and boom of someone, Roger, presumably, or one of his minions, pounding on heavy, hollow metal. Disassembling an old monster of a cast-iron furnace, from the sound of it. Faint music played through the door of apartment on my left. Apparently, tenants still occupied the ground-floor rooms.

  I trod cautiously past the collection of matériel and took up a strategic position by the pallet to wait for the apparition to show itself in all its bloody glory. I would stay until Roger and crew knocked off for the day, or—if they worked late—until full dark. From the noise of a jackhammer or a drill that presently counterpointed the metal bashing, they were still hard at it.

  The only ghost I saw during the next five minutes was an obese black and white tomcat slipping through the door panel of the left-hand apartment and twitching its tail disdainfully out of the building.

  I had just finished an admiring appraisal of the hall’s hanging light fixture, when the door of the opposite apartment swung open and a man with sleek, butter-yellow hair stepped into the hall to block the way between me and the outer door.

  “Hello, Lil,” said Nathan.

  33.

  Though I expected our next meeting to occur in strictly formal circumstances, ever since my discovery this morning, I had armored myself against our inevitable encounter. So my voice, though flat, was without tremor.

  “Nathan. Back from the dead. You’re looking well.”

  “You’re a cool bitch.” A familiar peevish note infused his voice. “You don’t seem surprised to see me.”

  “I’m only surprised to see you here.” Of course, the building had a back exit. I slid slowly sideways along the box in preparation. From the basement the boom-da-boom of a sledge meeting metal increased in volume. Or maybe it was my heartbeat.

  “We knew you couldn’t resist hunting down a nasty,” Nathan said, and smiled.

  We?

  So they had planned a trap. Watching him, I shifted my weight to my kickoff foot to spin and run. Too late. The encircling arm that jerked my head up and pulled my body back against another body, as well as the cold blade held against the side of my neck, confirmed exactly what kind of a trap it was. The knife trembled, either in eagerness or nervousness. He stank of olives and oil of bay.

  “Feel that? I can cut your throat right now,” a shaky, excited voice behind me rasped. “Walk. Real slow.”

  Nathan stood aside and gestured at the open doorway. I walked. Slowly. Step by careful lock step. Into a high-ceilinged room that in more gracious times had been a parlor.

  A crowded bed-sitter now, jammed with oddments of mismatched furniture, packing boxes and luggage. It was like walking into a bloodbath—red being the principal color for upholstery, drapes and artwork. Three tall windows on one side and a galley kitchen defined by an arch on the other. There might be a side exit from that kitchen, but I doubted it. I didn’t doubt the purpose of the heavy plastic draped over the crimson counterpane on the double bed against the far wall. Nor of the restraints that dangled from the posts of the high, carved headboard framed by twin nightstands.

  It took no Talent whatsoever to foresee and to anticipate my immediate future. Nathan planned some conjugal torture, first. My body later tossed or buried somewhere—if they didn’t arrange to blame it on the nonexistent ghost. I had one bitter thought. If I’d swallowed my chagrin and silly pride and taken Johnny Thresher up on that cup of coffee, I wouldn’t be in this predicament.

  Behind us, the door thunked shut, followed by a click and the rattle of a chain.

  “Wait, Kevin,” said Nathan and came around in front of us, looked me over, still smiling.

  Kevin. Cornett. He must own this building too.

  Cornett eased his chokehold and removed his throttling arm to grip my shoulder instead. He slid the knife up and down a fraction at the edge of my jaw to remind me it was still there. If there had been only the two of us, he would have been sorry he did that, but Nathan blocked any move I might make.

  That’s when I realized that Cornett couldn’t be the necromancer who had raised Phillip as a zombie and sent Nathan’s simulacrum to the house. The energy, the power, simply wasn’t there in his pudgy hands. Even ceremonial magic leaves a taint. There must be a third.

  Nathan patted my cheek and ended the faux caress by digging a fingernail along my chin. He’d grown a revolting little moustache. “We need her keys. That’s her car parked out front. I want it moved around to the back with yours, out of sight.” He poked in my right jacket pocket and found them, bounced them in his palm. “Put her down on the bed.”

  Kevin propelled me forward past a sectional sofa the color of clotted blood, a Burmese-style coffee table and an elegant Queen Anne armchair, until we reached the side of the four-poster.

  I expected his shove and was ready for it. Instead of sprawling facedown as he intended, I hit the mattress, rolled and came off the other side to land on my feet. He screeched and slithered clumsily after me. I grabbed an earthen pitcher of flowers from the nightstand and swung it backhand. The pitcher smashed across his face and shattered beautifully. He dropped the knife. I lurched for it and missed. Nathan, charging, blocked the roundhouse I aimed at him with the remains of the pitcher and grappled with me. I twisted away, whirled to dash for the windows with the idea of smashing them too and yelling for help.

  Nathan’s fist clipped my jaw and knocked me, stunned but not out, back across the bed. I lay like a rag doll with muscles that refused to connect with my brain, at the mercy of rough hands that yanked and pulled and jerked me across the cold plastic.

  By the time my sight returned to normal, I lay spread-eagled on my back amid fragments of crockery and a scatter of dried blossoms. Faceup. My head was rammed against the headboard and my wrists were suspended in biting leather loops. He intended me to be a person, then, not a blind vessel. He wanted me to see.

  The knife had ended up in a phallic position between my spread legs. Nathan gave the thongs around my ankles a last jerk and straightened. When he saw my eyes were open, he leered and deliberately fondled his crotch. The gesture stripped away his habit of supercilious sophistication like a plain brown wrapper from a porn mag.

  Cornett lounged in the kitchen archway, glaring malice from one green eye, dabbing at cuts and grazes on his plump cheek and swelling nose with a wet towel. His grimace displayed a collection of bones that all the dental strips in the world would never whiten.

  Satisfaction. I’d gotten him good. Not so with Nathan, though his pale yellow sweater showed a rip on the right arm and his usually sleek hair hung in long primrose strands about his face.

  “Just so you know, I changed my will,” I said, after I got my mouth to work.

  Nathan’s smile became just teeth. He retrieved the knife and came around the foot of the bed in spastic, uncoordinated steps. Nathan appeared to have lost his former grace entirely. Perhaps the result of a certain disastrous bi-location in my bathroom.

  He dropped down beside me. “I can challenge it. Who’d you leave it to?”

  I hoped he’d ask.

  “The SOS. I thought they could use the money,” I lied, and laughed until he hit me. A flat-palmed slap that rocked my head and rattled my teeth and made my eyes sting, but I managed to laugh. Helpless, and I laughed. No reason for it except that I had not heard the Weeper; the bean sidhe had not sung her dirge song.

  Around the taste of blood, I sneered
. “You’re so brave, Nathan.”

  His face darkened. Taking his time, he sliced the straps of my top and dragged it down. Sawed open my bra. With the tip of the knife, he semicircled each breast, barely breaking the skin at first. Surface cuts, beaded in red promise. I didn’t dare breathe. His gaze searched to my face as he drew the knife down. Though my belly rippled and quivered, I set my teeth and stared back. He wanted fear and he didn’t get it. Because he didn’t, he gouged the knife a little deeper. Oh, Christ, it hurt.

  “Such sweet titties, Lil. If I slice all the way around, could I twist them off, I wonder… What do you think, Kevin?” Kevin giggled.

  I strove to disconnect my body from my mind. The knife slashed a second slow spiral, inside the first. If I survived this, I thought distantly, I’d be scar-marked forever, on the outside as well as in. Funny how the mind leaps to after when the present is impossibly hopeless.

  Cornett shuffled over, drawn by the parenthesis etched in blood between my breasts. He stared at them, licking and gnawing at his lower lip. He pulled the armchair closer, sat down and hunched forward.

  “Your bitch hit me,” he whispered. “Cut her pants off and turn her over. I want to carve on her ass. Just like that.” My buttocks clenched involuntarily.

  “You’ll have your turn,” Nathan promised, wiping off the blood on my jacket and passing the knife over. I let out a tiny breath. Nathan might have decided to do my nipples next. “When I’m through with her. Going to take my sweet, sweet time.”

  Cornett tossed the knife from one hand to another in impatience, pouted, then stuck the blade between the cushion and the chair arm.

  “There’s a curse stone with your name on it, Nathan,” I said, ignoring the warm tickle of blood sliding down my ribs. Whatever the outcome, I wanted him to know.