The Best Paranormal Crime Stories Ever Told

by Martin H. Greenberg

  “St. Sulpice stands. Notre Dame stands. Le Tour Eiffel stands. In the distance, away from the shouting, you can see Sacré Coeur. The bridges remain. If the Germans were to destroy Paris, they would bomb the bridges so that no army could follow. Then they would destroy the monuments to destroy our souls.”

  Decker couldn’t resist any longer. “How do you know the students appear later?”

  “They are less solid.”

  “You can’t touch them?” Decker asked.

  “No,” the younger man said. “You have not tried?”

  He had avoided everything. He had avoided the students and the soldiers and the flags. He heard the whispery voices, and figured they had come from his own drunkenness.

  “Can you touch current nightmares?” Decker asked.

  “Only reality,” the old man said.

  Her skin, cold against Decker’s fingers. So she had been real. Had he spoken to her once? Holding his notebook? Wanting to know who she was?

  Why would he have spoken to her? He wasn’t yet working for the Trib. He was playing at being a famous writer, the American James Joyce, yet to publish his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

  “Ah,” the old man said, peering into Decker’s face. “Something precipitated your visions. You did not see them when you first came to Paris.”

  Decker looked at him. The old man’s skin was papery thin, his eyebrows so bushy they seemed to grow toward his scalp.

  Paris had been clean. Paris had been pure. Truly the City of Light, all beauty and glistening stone, history calling to him.

  Not like Milwaukee. Milwaukee had turned dark, especially near the lakefront. He had seen corpses of sailors, washed against the rocks, their uniforms still sodden with the waters of Lake Michigan. He had screamed the first time, and people had run to him, not to them, not even when he pointed . . . .

  He shook his head. He did not want to think of this. He did not want to remember it, how each street had something, someone, who sprawled along a road or had been shot on apartment steps or had been squashed flat by a new-fangled motorcar.

  Sometimes two, sometimes three per block. He had walked with his eyes closed, and his mother—his beautiful tiny mother—whispering that he had to do something else, something that took him away from death.

  Write your novel, she had said. I will tell people of my son, the famous writer.

  And she had given him all of her pin money, money he knew she relied upon to get away from his father.

  His father, who drank.

  “What was it that precipitated these visions?” the old man asked. “A drink, perhaps. You like your drink.”

  Decker stared at him, feeling his gaze go flat with anger.

  “No, it could not be drink,” the younger man said. “Or he wouldn’t continue drinking. It’s got to be hereditary. Let me see your hands.”

  Decker closed his hands into fists. He didn’t want these people to touch him. He looked at the old man.

  “You said you had a story for me.”

  “I have a city of stories, if you’re willing to listen,” the old man said. “But first, we must see the root of your vision.”

  Decker stared at him, then slowly, reluctantly, extended his right hand.

  He had first seen her on the Champs Elysées, a vision in white. She looked like the old world blending with the new, her Gibson Girl hairdo, the wide-brimmed hat (with ribbons trailing it) that she carried in her left hand. Her dress was narrow, with a flip just near the knees, her stockings perfect, her shoes solid, old-fashioned, buttoned-up leather.

  He had seen no Parisian woman dressed like that—mixing styles. Parisian women had their own style, a lot more fluid, a lot more suggestive, and all of them wore cloche hats (if they wore hats at all). She smiled when she saw him, a broad, wide American smile, the kind that held nothing back.

  He tipped his hat to her. She laughed and continued onward as if she had known they would see each other again.

  Of course they had. She had been looking at the sights, such a tourist, and he had been moving from park bench to park bench, staring at the monuments.

  He had talked with her on Pont Neuf, more than once. She had laughed and flirted and never once told him her name. No one seemed to want to tell him names.

  The thought disconcerted him for a moment, and the image of her laughing face wavered. He heard voices all around him, male voices mostly, and the air filled with tobacco smoke. An old man was peering at the palm of his hand as if it held the secrets of the universe.

  And then she was back, looking at him sideways. She was holding his hand, palm up, as if she could see his future in it. She was young, enjoying Paris. He hadn’t enjoyed Paris until her. Not like this—climbing the Eiffel Tower and going to Versailles to see the gardens, wandering through the Louvre, and eating bread and cheese for lunch in the Tuileries.

  And he wrote. How he wrote. The novel, abandoned, he didn’t care about Lincoln. He wrote instead about—

  . . . the woman, discarded, like abandoned laundry at the base of the bridge. Her killer, dark, darker than anything Edgar Allan Poe could imagine in his darkest Rue Morgue dreams. The man carried her from the bridge itself, down the side, preparing to dump her in the Seine when someone called out . . .

  He looked up, saw the younger man staring at him with something like horror, the old man with eyes full of compassion.

  “Corpse Vision,” the young man said. “You have Corpse Vision.”

  Decker wasn’t sure he wanted them to tell him what Corpse Vision was, although he had a hunch he knew.

  The memories scrolled backwards—like the nightmares the old man had mentioned—the first homicide call on the police beat, near one of the speakeasies by the lakefront. The dead man wore spats and a snazzy hat that blew toward Decker in the wind. He caught the hat, knew enough to carry it back to the detective, and as he did, his foot brushed the corpse, his ankle actually hitting the dead man’s elbow.

  A little bit of nothing—a bit of a shiver, a bit of a chill—but not much more until he returned to the Journal’s city room. He found a typewriter and banged out his recollections, handing the paper to the copy desk for expansion. He went back to the desk to type a few impressions, like he used to do, for the novels he would someday write. But first, he rested his cheek on his fist and closed his eyes.

  Spats rose from the sand, backwards, like a Charlie Chaplin film being rewound, shaking his fist at someone near on the docks. A flash of a knife, a dropped bottle of gin, some money clanging against the wood, and Decker opened his eyes, terrified of his waking dream.

  The next morning, he went to the lakefront as follow-up, at least that was what he told himself, and instead, he saw the sailors, washed up on the rocks, the air cold off Lake Michigan, and two little boys, standing in the middle of the corpses, fishing.

  That was when Decker screamed. The last time he screamed when he saw a corpse.

  But not the first time.

  The first time—Lord, he’d been ten. On his grandfather’s farm. His father had come back from the stream, looking grim, the female barn cat following him, crying plaintively. Decker should have followed his father, but he was already afraid of the man. So he went to the stream, saw the tiny kitten corpse on one of the rocks, touched it—the cold damp fur—and turned.

  The man behind him had no eyes. He was tied to a tree, his skin filled with holes, birds sitting on his shoulders and pecking at his face.

  Decker had screamed and screamed. His father had come first, pulled him away, told him he was a baby—he knew it was spring and every spring, his grandfather took the pick of the litter for barn cats and drowned the rest so the farm didn’t get overrun with cats.

  Someday, his dad had said grimly, this’ll be your job.

  But Decker only dimly heard the words. Instead, he stared at the dead man tied to the tree, the birds taking chunks out of his face as if he were a particularly delectable roast. Decker wanted to bury his own face
in his dad’s chest, but he knew better.

  He also knew he needed to gather himself, to stop being so upset, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t. He sobbed and sobbed and finally his dad picked him up like a sack of potatoes and slung him over his shoulder, carrying him back, Decker hiccoughing, his father whacking his butt with every single hitched breath.

  His mother came into his room that night when he screamed again, the dead man alive in his room as a vision, running from men Decker dimly recognized. They would catch the dead man, carve him up, tie him to the tree, and laugh when they told him the birds would get him. They laughed. And Decker recognized the laughs.

  But that wasn’t why he screamed. He screamed at the sunlight afternoon invading his dark room, the trees no longer there leading down to the stream, the bank where he’d happily played just a few years before.

  His mother had come and shushed him. She had cradled him as if he were still a baby, and rocked him, but she said nothing.

  Except when she thought he was asleep, she went back to the room she shared with his father—You promised, she said.

  I did not send him down there, his father said. He went on his own.

  You should have watched him.

  You coddle him.

  He doesn’t need to see.

  At his age, I was drowning kittens. I had killed chickens and butchered pigs. I fished. You deny him childhood.

  That isn’t childhood, she said. See what it has done to you.

  You used to love me, his father said.

  Before the darkness ate you, she said. Before it ate you alive.

  “You could spend your whole life in escape,” the old man said, again misusing idioms. It was the odd choice of words that brought Decker back to the Dôme, not the fact that he wanted to be back.

  The men from the Transatlantic Review had left. In their place, a group from the Herald. One of the reporters tipped his hat to Decker, who nodded. He couldn’t for the life of him think of the man’s name.

  “Each place will be new and fresh until death,” the old man said. “Then you will see—and in Europe, there is much death to see.”

  “I’m not seeing corpses,” Decker said before he could stop himself. Not that he admitted anyway. He drank too much to remember what he saw. And what he did remember the old man called backwards nightmares.

  “You are not looking,” the old man said. “You have deliberately blinded your most important eye.”

  Decker was getting a headache, and he was starting to wish for a drink. This had been a mistake. He didn’t like being sober, not any more.

  “You lied,” Decker said. “You said you had a story for me. This whole meeting has been nothing but gibberish.”

  He stood, conscious of how odd he felt. He didn’t want to be near these men. He didn’t want to be at the Dôme. He wanted to talk to his mother, and she was thousands of miles away, probably worrying about him, like she did. She worried.

  She thought he could outrun the family curse. The old man just said he couldn’t.

  Decker didn’t want to think about any of it.

  “We will be here tomorrow night,” the old man said.

  “I won’t,” Decker said.

  “Unless you finish the story,” said the younger man.

  “We would love to read it,” the old man said.

  “Sure,” Decker said. And he would love to start over, that fresh bright attitude he had brought to Paris so far gone that he couldn’t even remember how it felt.

  Maybe he could recapture it somewhere else. He had heard nice things about Vienna. There was another sister paper in Geneva—or maybe that was a sister to the Herald. United Press operated out of most countries.

  He could leave in the morning. He didn’t need the language skills. He hadn’t had all that many in France. Besides, French was the language of diplomacy. He spoke it just badly enough for people to take pity on him.

  He was going to go speak it badly now at the nearest bar he could find. He would speak it until he couldn’t talk any more, until he didn’t think about all the things the old man had brought back into his mind. He would be so bleary-eyed drunk that maybe he wouldn’t even dream.

  But he made the mistake of stopping in his room first. He wanted more cash, which he found rolled up in his socks in the bottom drawer of the shabby bureau. Anyone would know to look in the sock drawer for money. It was a testament to how honest the staff was at the Hôtel de Lisbonne that no one had stolen his stash.

  How honest or how lax. He couldn’t remember the last time they cleaned his room.

  He wiped a finger over the typewriter, removing dust. His eye caught the edge of that paper.

  . . . the . . .

  He sat down, xxed out the “the,” and typed:

  Sophie Nance Brown, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Harcourt Brown lately of Newport, Rhode Island, in what the police initially reported as a bungled suicide attempt.

  (Although, he thought, how could it have been bungled if she did indeed die?)

  The body, discovered by an American tourist, fell on the walkway beneath the Pont Neuf. A witness claimed she had jumped off the bridge’s wide stone railing, laughing as she fell.

  But the American tourist contradicted these things, saying no one could have seen her fall. He found her at 7 a.m. Any witnesses would have had to be on the bridge in the middle of the night.

  The American also pointed to her missing stockings and mismatched shoes. Her traveling companion, one Eleanor Rose Stockdale of Battle Creek, Michigan, said Miss Brown had never traveled anywhere without her St. Christopher’s medal and her grandmother’s solid gold wedding ring, both missing.

  Police now believe Sophie Nance Brown is the third victim of a killer who play tricks on investigating officers. The witness who claimed she had fallen matched the description of a man seen carrying an unconscious woman to the base of the bridge around midnight.

  Anyone with information about this most interesting case should contact the Prefect of Police.

  Decker stared at the words. The paper did indeed come out of the platen curled, but he didn’t care. The story was good enough for the Trib, if it published crime news like that (which it did not, afraid it would scare the tourists). But the story wasn’t really good, just good enough.

  He had written the facts as he had been trained. But that wasn’t what he knew.

  What he knew was this:

  The woman discarded at the foot of the bridge looked uncomfortably young. Her brown hair was falling out of Gibson Girl do, now horribly out of fashion, her lips painted a vivid red. Part of the lip rouge stained her front teeth. If she were alive, she would turn away from him, and surreptiously rub at that stain with her index finger.

  She had turned away from him and wiped at the stain, the very first time she had seen him. Sophie Nance Brown, of Newport and Westchester and points south. Sophie Nance Brown with the laughing eyes, who said she had come to Paris for the adventure .

  But her index finger was broken, bent backwards at an angle painful to look at, even now, when he knew she could feel nothing.

  She had felt something. She had felt too much something when she went to the bridge after a long dinner on the Right Bank with friends. She wanted to feel the breeze in her hair, look at the moonlight over the Seine. She asked her traveling companion, Eleanor Rose Stockdale of Battle Creek, Michigan, to accompany her, but Eleanor Rose, a sensible girl, had heard that nice people did not stand on the bridges at night and had declined.

  Later, Miss Stockdale would say she thought saying such things would discourage Miss Brown, but other friends said nothing discouraged Miss Brown when she set her mind to something.

  Miss Brown had met a young man who had captured her fancy. Her interest in him was what she wanted to discuss with her friends at dinner. Knowing him had caused an ethical dilemma for her, especially since she was so far from home. He lived alone in a solitary room in one of the more disreputable hotels near the Sorbonne.

&
nbsp; Miss Brown worried that she was too old-fashioned for the new morality, but too young to press the young man into something less exciting, something more permanent.

  Instead of listening to her, Miss Brown’s friends teased her “mercilessly.” They laughed their way through dinner, interrupting her, until she grew angry, threw down her napkin along with a few francs and left the restaurant, heading for the Pont Neuf.

  The Pont Neuf was suggestive, Miss Stockdale said, because Miss Brown found it romantic.

  Miss Brown stood in the center of the bridge, peering out over the Seine at the famed lights of Paris, thinking that no woman should stand in such a spot alone. The light played with her old-fashioned hairstyle and her modern clothing, her ankles nicely turned out, the skirt accenting her shapely legs.

  He had noticed that. He had noticed the contradiction from the start.

  Decker paused, his wrists aching. He had them bent at an odd angle. His headache had cleared for the first time since he started drinking in Paris.

  He wasn’t writing news any longer—or at least, he wasn’t writing news that he recognized. He was writing something else, seeing something else, something he didn’t want to think about.

  The pages had piled up on the small desk beside his typewriter. The voice was odd. It wasn’t his, and it wasn’t exactly the voice of impartial journalist. He was edging into something else, something his editors would disapprove of—“worried” and “thinking” and “noticing”—actual viewpoints, which were not allowed in the dispassionate prose of journalism.

  Decker rolled another sheet of paper in the platen, ready to type that damning “the” again, ready to leave it, and count all of this as an aberration.

  Instead, he continued:

  He had watched her since she got off the boat. She wore a wide brimmed hat with a red ribbon, fanciful and old-fashioned. Her clothing hinted at a girl who wanted to break out of the old ways, but her hair spoke of a girl who cherished what had come before.