by Aaron Polson
Yellow police tape still covered Jerry’s door, which of course would be locked solid anyway. It wasn’t the first floor which concerned me, though. I parked across the street and hurried along the side of the house. Because school let out at three, I was at Jerry’s by a quarter to four, before most of his neighbors would be home from work. The basement windows on the east side of the house were locked solid, so I checked the rear. Tall trees shaded the backyard, providing a nice amount of cool cover. Both rear windows were shut tight and the same for the opposite side of the house. I’d begun to sweat despite the shade. My hands shook.
Go home, I thought. Get rid of the scrapbooks. Forget about it, like Heather said. The choppy logic which began to draw a line from Jerry’s obsession with the dead, the unhappy dead, toward Heather’s basement brought me to his house. The uneasiness won. I had to see Jerry’s place for myself. See if what he scribbled in his scrapbook was true. I broke one of the basement windows. I kicked out the glass with my shoes and broke each tiny fragment free of the frame so I could safely slide through the opening. The shards fell to the floor below with soft tinkles. Grabbing the flashlight from the truck of my car, I slunk back to the open window. The time hovered just before four. Still enough time to slip in and look around without being noticed, I imagined. I dropped in, landing on the broken glass with a crunch.
The basement floor was concrete but old and cracked in several places, showing wide gaps of two to three inches and dark soil beneath. The slab couldn’t have been more than three or four inches thick. A set of simple wooden steps led to the first floor. Jerry’s place. Boxes and a few pieces of dust-covered furniture littered the area. In a corner, I found something which froze my blood.
A section of the floor had been removed and now rested against the far wall. A pick ax, sledgehammer, and spade leaned next to it. I pointed the yellow beam of my flashlight at the gap. Dirt, I thought at first. Nothing but dirt. I walked closer. I felt, for a moment, as though I might choke on my heart.
The hole was deep enough to lose my flashlight beam across the surface. A tiny pile of dirt sat next to the hole, but not nearly enough to fill it.
I knelt and looked down, pointing the light. Shadows flitted inside. I thought I saw something move. The light reflected off something in the hole, something pale and yellow. A sound skittered through the basement behind me, a basement which, at that time of year, was growing very dark by four in the afternoon. The sun would set by five. I pushed off the ground and scrambled to my feet. Surely the sound was just a rat or even fat mouse, but in the dark, in the house where one of my friends and colleagues died, it proved enough to fire bolts of fear through my chest. I held my breath. The room fell silent again. I looked at the hole. When my eyes lifted, I found it on the ground near the shovel, half in shadow so I hadn’t noticed it before. A fragment, really, but a bit of bone, a rather long phalange if my memory of human anatomy held.
As I said, it was dark. Getting darker by the moment. But tiny splotches of brown—a reddish-brown of dried blood—marred the tip of the bone. I staggered toward the window and climbed out of the opening with the aid of a wooden kitchen chair as a stool.
Panting in the front seat of my car, I noticed a new text message on my phone from Steiner:
meet me at pats about your friend 7 pm
I looked at my hands, both covered with dirt, and back toward Jerry’s place.
Steiner had picked a bar not far from downtown. The sign out front advertised Pat’s in flickering red neon, and a quarter inch of grease painted almost every surface in the interior. It was a quiet place, though. The kind of bar in which two or three regulars are married to their stools and they all possess an unfriendly eye for strangers. After a few moments of awkward “catching up,” Steiner, still as scrawny and short as I remember from undergrad, cut right to the reason for our reunion.
“Your buddy, this Larson guy, he was thoroughly messed up.” He lit a cigarette, took a long puff, and settled his black eyes on mine. “Real bad.”
“I don’t understand?”
He leaned forward, hands on the table and said, “The final coroner’s report sort of fudged on cause of death. I think they put down aneurism or something. Totally bogus. I’ve got a buddy who works records—he feeds me all sorts of juicy tidbits.”
“Straight out of Chandler,” I said. “So what about cause of death?”
“Who the fuck is Chandler?”
“Raymond Chandler. An author. Detective noir. What about Jerry Larson?”
Steiner sucked in another puff and nodded. “Yeah. My buddy says his internal organs were scrambled. Cut up pretty good.”
He might have kicked me in the stomach. My mouth flapped open for a moment, and then the words came. “There would have been a wound. Something on the body.”
“Nope. When the coroner cut him open, bam.” He slapped the back of one hand into the palm of the other. “Guts everywhere. But that’s not the kicker. He was missing a few parts.”
“What?”
“No heart. No liver. Only one kidney. They didn’t find a trace in the mess that was left.”
Jerry’s last text ran through my memory: they want to be whole
Guts everywhere. Missing parts. I thought of the scrapbook—the articles about human sacrifice, bodily mutilation. Evisceration. The hole in his basement was deep. One human finger mocked me with its trace of Jerry’s blood.
“You all right?”
My head wagged back and forth. I felt dizzy as I stood. “I’ve got to go.”
“Look, Aaron—”
I tossed some cash on the table and left, Steiner still calling my name as Pat’s door slammed behind me.
Whatever killed Jerry Larson was real, real enough to scramble a man’s guts inside his shell. Real enough to take the parts it wanted, the parts which would make it whole. When you’re given information like that, when you learn they killed someone, murdered a man in his own home and stole his heart, the choppy logic, the impossible, macabre logic of the ghoul and specter becomes painfully real. Jerry’s basement. Heather’s basement. There was a connection. Jerry knew, and it killed him. Did they kill him because he knew? Did they kill him because he found something in the basement of Heather’s place? Did something from the fragment in his basement simply kill him to become whole? I couldn’t shake Heather’s face from my thoughts. I couldn’t shake the double image of the hollow pit in Jerry’s basement from my thoughts. He’d said there was something in Heather’s place, too. Something buried.
they want to be whole
They’d found Jerry. They would have me, too. I knew they would, before long.
Five minutes from Pat’s, I pounded on Heather’s front door, flashlight in hand. Her porch light was on, but the house lay in almost complete darkness—a light was on in the back and the TV flickered in the living room. I went to a window, squinted inside, and shined the flashlight. I saw no movement except for the shifting and sliding of shadows.
I panicked. I’m not proud or brave or particularly heroic. At that point, I could have still been very, very wrong. When I blinked, I saw Jerry’s face when I dropped him off at his place, his eyes wide and scared. He tried to tell me, then. He sent me a message before they found him. Before they killed him. They found him in Heather’s crawl space. He found them in the basement under his rented house here in the city. Under his childhood home. They found him. They were coming. Like I said, I panicked. I tried Heather’s door again. I lowered my shoulder and lunged. The wood groaned. I lunged a second time, and the wood cracked. I brushed sweat from my face. I used my foot on the third assault, kicking at deadbolt with the bottom of my shoe. It took two more poundings, but the jamb split and I tumbled inside.
A humid, dirty smell clung to everything. A basement smell. The air was hot. I flipped on the switch next to the door.
“Heather?”
No answer. She wasn’t in the living room, or either bedroom. The tiny light I’d seen from the front windo
w came from in the back, from the little hallway behind her bathroom. From the hallway with the trapdoor to her crawl space. The TV was on, mumbling in the background. I chewed on my tongue. I saw images from newspaper clippings, odd hieroglyphs, hand-drawn layouts of ancient cities, buried monuments. Jerry’s hand-scrawled words, they’re down there if we dig deep enough, written in the margin of a magazine article. I clicked off the television as I walked through the room.
they want to be whole
A broken glass lay on the floor of Heather’s kitchen along with a sticky pool of orange juice. A few spatters of blood—dark and thick—marred the cabinets and bathroom door. I found more blood on the floor, soaked into black dots across the carpet. I followed the dots. I traced them to the closet, to the door in the floor. The house listened, too quiet. Waiting. I held my breath for the sound of something, anything. Whatever sound they might make. A tiny piece of cloth protruded from under the trap door in the back room, and the edge of the torn and jagged cloth was stained with blood.
A moment passed. Another, silent, heavy moment in which the house listened for my next breath. What did I do? What could I do? Go down there, under her house, where she never went? I imagined they had her, dead perhaps, mutilated like Jerry. Or something else? The police had found Jerry’s body on his bed. Heather was gone. How much of her would they take to be whole? In a cold moment surrounded by the sour air of my colleague’s house, they broke me. I broke. I’m not proud or brave or even the slightest fraction heroic. I left with Jerry’s scrapbooks, a duffle bag full of clothes, and emptied what I could from the bank ATM.
I’m anxious now, always on edge, especially in strange beds. Motels away from major highways. Spots on the map which seem isolated from the locations indicated in Jerry’s research. Sleep doesn’t come easy. Waking hours don’t come easy. Where on earth, can a man hide from the dead? Where can any of us hide when the unhappy legions stir from their moldering tombs?
Acknowledgements
“Cargo” was originally published in Blade Red: Dark Pages Volume 1, edited by Brenton Tomlinson
“Tesoro’s Magic Bullet” was originally published in Nossa Morte, edited by Michael De Kler
“The Way of Things in Fly Over Country” was originally published in Dead Worlds: Undead Stories, edited by Anthony Giangregorio
“Former Vocations” was originally published in Vicious Verses and Reanimated Rhymes, edited by A.P. Fuchs
“The Distillery” was originally published in Necrotic Tissue #10, edited by R. Scott McCoy
“In the Primal Library” was originally published in Three Crow Press/Morrigan e-zine
“Sea of Green, Sea of Gold” was originally published in Day Terrors, edited by Kfir Luzzatto and Dru Pagliassotti
“Bona Fide King of His Realm” originally appeared in Everyday Weirdness
“Down There” originally appeared in Crossed Genres, edited by Kelly Jennings and Kay T. Holt
“Familiar Faces” is original to this collection
As always, thank you for reading.