by Emby Press
Suddenly there was a mighty howl from Jack Right.
‘Don’t! Oh, God no! Not that!’
The man was writhing on the sofa, thrashing his arms about, kicking his legs. And as Barnum stared and wondered what to do, he could see why.
Jack Left was moving. His dead limbs, still cold and pale, were coming back to life. Fingers curled. His leg thumped his heel against the floor as if trying to stand.
‘What in the name of…’ Barnum backed away, dragging a petrified Coleman with him. Both men retreated to the other side of the room, backs up against the cupboards. ‘He’s alive!’
Left’s eyes opened – but they were not his. Pure white, with no pupils visible, the thing that had been Jack Left turned its head to face Jack Right and opened its mouth. Sharp, pointed teeth parted to reveal a long tongue that snaked out between his lips.
Its hands reached out and grabbed Jack Right’s throat and started to squeeze. Right rolled his eyes to Barnum, but the man was rigid with fear, appalled.
The demon grinned and chuckled as it murdered Jack Right, nails digging into the man’s flesh, blood seeping from the penetrating wounds as it choked him to death.
And when it was over, when Barnum found he could again move, both Jacks fell limp and dead. Left’s hands were still clutched tightly around Right’s neck.
*
‘Miss Geoffrey isn’t coming back,’ said Coleman as he sat in Barnum’s office the next day.
Barnum wasn’t surprised. ‘A number of the freaks have decided to quit,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to get some more. That’ll mean going on the road again to audition new ones. Mrs Barnum won’t be pleased.’
‘Guess they weren’t happy with a demon living among them,’ muttered Coleman. ‘Can’t say I’m too happy about it either, except it’s over now. How did you know Right killed his brother?’
Barnum lit a cigar and picked up his pen.
‘Easiest deduction in the world,’ he said. ‘Nothing could be simpler, once you read the letter. Jack Right had nothing to live for. His own brother mocked him, tried to tell him he was a product of Satan himself. The woman Right loved desperately would not return that love. So he decided to die. He knew his own death would remove his brother from the world, too. And strangling Left was the easiest way to accomplish both deaths.’
‘But the burned hand, Mr Barnum? Jack Right had a burned hand.’
‘The gas was turned up high. He wanted to pretend a demon had killed them. Perhaps it was meant as a justification in his own mind, perhaps it was just a mockery of his brother’s arcane interests. It was easy to hold his hand in the gas which he’d turned up to give a suitably Hellish atmosphere to the room. A burned hand; stifling heat; a demon. Easy.’
‘So, Right was teased by Left for being in love with Miss Geoffrey, and so Right killed him. Which meant he would also die. But Mr Barnum – what was that thing that appeared? The thing that strangled Right? It sure wasn’t Jack Left. He was dead.’
Barnum nodded. ‘That’s what chills the blood, Coleman. Perhaps the Jacks really were the product of the devil. Perhaps Jack Left found knowledge in those ungodly books of his that allowed something to possess him and revenge his murder.’
What was that thing? Barnum could not deny he’d seen it. And something had breathed down his neck. Something had been there, always behind him, in that dressing room. Perhaps there were some things better not known.
‘I don’t like it, Mr Barnum,’ muttered Coleman as he left the office. ‘I don’t like it and it’s going to be bad for business.’
Barnum sat down behind his desk and bit the end off a cigar. Coleman was right, of course: as soon as the story of the double murder was out, the press would flock to hear the details. So would the public.
Suddenly, a broad smile lit up his face.
He drew a sheet of paper towards him and began to write down ideas for public tours of the museum’s dressing rooms. He sketched a draft of the poster he would put up in the foyer tomorrow: See the lair of the demon! Read a copy of the fateful letter! Thrill to the re-enactment of the murders of the two cursed twins! $1.00 a ticket!
He would make a fortune.
MEMENTO MORBID
C. L. Werner
The blades of a steel fan ticked away with electric monotony as they struggled to bring some measure of relief to the stuffy little office just off Phoenix’s Central Avenue. Outside, the temperature had entered triple digits, driving even the lizards to seek the cool darkness of whatever shade they could find. Inside, the office wasn’t quite so bad. The swamp cooler on the roof was fighting the good fight. If someone stood just under the vent, they might manage some degree of comfort.
Byron Flay loosened his tie and shifted around so that the full blast coming from his fan would hit his face and neck. He frowned when he saw the artificial breeze flipping the pages of the book he’d been perusing, a Portuguese treatise on the practices of Inca medicine men. Irritably, he moved a Hopi kachina doll across the desk and used the wooden ogre to hold his place for him. The image grinned back at him with a maw of carved fangs, conjuring up memories he’d tried his best to forget. Then again, that was the whole purpose of the kachina doll. So that he wouldn’t forget.
Byron closed his hand around his shoulder. Even through his clothes, he could feel the puckered scar tissue from that long ago brush with the occult world, that moment when he’d stepped irrevocably from the mundane world of the natural into the nightmare realm of the supernatural. The many times he’d tried to tell himself it was all coincidence, that the immense wolf had been nothing more than an out of place animal, a lingering relic of frontier days.
Drew Blackshirt had been nothing but a charlatan, a bully who preyed upon the superstitions of his tribe to extort tribute from them. He hadn’t been a skin-walker, a sorcerer. It was only coincidence that the Navajo was found dead in the desert the morning after Byron’s fight with the wolf. It was only coincidence that the wolf had never been seen again after Blackshirt died.
He matched the kachina’s ugly grin. Blackshirt had died in 1935, almost twenty years ago. Byron had been a much younger man then, more robust physically but without the knowledge and experience he now had. At forty two, his body was beginning to decline. It was an effort to keep fat off his bones and he found his limbs not so limber as they once had been. Part of that, he knew, was due to his years of convalescence after being wounded by a mine in the Huertgen Forest during the War. Still, he knew age was eating away at him. Every day there seemed a few more grey strands in his once coal-black hair.
Sometimes he felt like a man out of place, out of step with the world. This was the era of the atom and the jet plane. The light of science was burning away the old darkness, bringing with it new discoveries every day. In this bright new dawn, this atomic age, the ancient fears that had dogged mankind throughout his history – and even before – seemed absurd, relics of old foolishness and nothing more. To devote one’s life to the study of such antiquated folklore and legend was to be as ridiculous as the myths themselves.
Byron ran his fingers along the scar and smiled. The myths weren’t ridiculous. The reality behind them might be more complex and weird than even legend claimed, but they were real just the same. Science could work wonders, but it was itself blind to anything that refused to step into the light of inquiry and scrutiny. There were things and forces that kept to the darkness, and the brighter the light of knowledge shone, the deeper that darkness grew. The occult didn’t bow to the preconceptions of any researcher. To find the supernatural it had to be sought out and under its own terms.
Except in those ghastly moments when light and darkness collided and the supernatural had no more shadows in which to hide. Byron Flay had made a career investigating those collisions, those accidents when the paranormal intruded upon the mundane world.
The sound of the office door swinging open roused Byron from his thoughts. Inwardly, he castigated himself for his inattention. Before the War, be
fore his convalescence, he’d had the ears of a fox and the eyes of a hawk. His senses had been keyed to a degree where he’d have sensed Beverley Tanner leaving her desk in the outer office long before she reached his door.
Outwardly, Byron adopted a warm smile and greeted his secretary with an equally warm hello. “Lunch already?” he asked. It was an old joke, a dig at Beverley’s obstinate work ethic. In the two years she’d been working for him, he couldn’t remember a time when she broke off early for anything. More often than not, he was forced to chase her out of the office at the end of the day, assuring her that her work would wait until the next day.
It was peculiar, really, to find someone as young and vital as Beverley who could find such curious work as Byron set her fulfilling. Every day, dozens of newspapers and magazines from across the globe would arrive at the office. Beverley’s job was to sort through them, hunting down any articles or reports that might involve some preternatural element. Flying saucers had come to dominate much of his secretary’s time of late, with strange lights being sighted all over the nation. Byron wasn’t sure what might be behind the phenomenon, but he didn’t want to be too dismissive, recalling some of the weird occult experiments the Nazis had conducted during the War with an arcane substance they called vril. It was just possible that the flap of flying saucer incidents meant someone was continuing the Nazi experiments.
Beverley returned Byron’s smile, but it was too worried to carry much sincerity. Her milky complexion seemed a touch paler as she extended her hand towards him. “The mail came,” she said. Her dark eyes glanced down at the single letter she held out to him. “This was in there.”
As though he were reaching for a rattlesnake, Byron drew the letter from Beverley’s fingers. He hesitated before bringing it across the desk to where he sat. Grimly, he set it down beside the telephone and looked back up at Beverley. “You’d better call Detective Caffran. Let him know another letter is over here. When you have him on the line, connect me with him.”
“Maybe… maybe it doesn’t mean.” Beverley was shivering, hugging herself as a chill that had nothing to do with temperature crawled down her lean body.
“Maybe,” Byron said, trying to invest some kind of conviction in his voice. When he saw Beverley flick a wayward strand of her dark hair back behind her ear, he knew neither of them believed it. She had a nervous habit of doing that whenever she felt ‘out of sorts’ as she put it. All in all, it was an admirably restrained reaction to something they both knew meant that somewhere in Phoenix someone had been brutally murdered.
Byron waited until Beverley withdrew into the outer office before he allowed himself to look at the letter beside his phone. It was innocuous enough; his name and the address of his office scribbled on a simple envelope such as could be bought in any dime store. But there had been three others like this one, and each of them had told the same hideous tale. A tale of blood and murder.
There was no mystery about why the letters were sent to him. Over the years, Byron’s name had appeared in the papers more than a few times, helping the police break up crooked séances and assisting university researchers in exposing phoney psychic phenomenon. An exorcism he’d participated in down in Kingman had been picked up by the radio and for a few weeks garnered him a bit of national exposure until the news services found some other story to distract the public. No, why the letters came to him was the only thing Byron didn’t find mysterious.
A string of grisly murders stretching back almost a month, the victims butchered in a fashion that would have had the city coming unglued if the details ever got out. That was what gave the letters their veracity. The writer, whoever he was, knew those details, knew them to a degree that only the police and the killer could know.
This time, the letter described a room in some seedy downtown dive. There was a man lying across the floor, or at least what had once been a man. His body had been cleaved in two, split from right shoulder to left hip. There were nauseous details about what that wound looked like. That was one difference between the letters and the actual crime scenes. In this heat, there’d be no trace of the ‘frost’ the author depicted clinging to the edges of the cut, though the police coroner would find tissue damage caused by some extreme cold. Frostbite in the middle of an Arizona summer.
The writer named the killer, or at least described him. That was where Detective Caffran stopped listening to Byron. He was too pragmatic to even entertain the idea that a murdering ghost was behind these atrocities.
The phone rang beside him. When he picked up the receiver, Byron found an exasperated Caffran at the other end of the line.
“I’m told you’ve gotten another of these damn letters,” Caffran growled into the line.
“Hello to you too, detective,” Byron greeted him in the calm, modulated tone he knew always grated on Caffran’s nerves. “Yes, another letter has arrived. That would make three.”
“I can count,” Caffran snarled back in annoyance. “Where does this nut say the stiff is this time?”
Byron hesitated a moment. When he’d brought the first letter to the attention of the police he’d had the distinction of being suspected of the murder. The second letter – and the second murder – had left him with an airtight alibi, however. He’d had a cop shadowing him when the second murder was committed. Caffran had been one of the loudest voices insisting Byron was still somehow responsible. When the detective spoke of a ‘nut’, he was making a thinly veiled jab at Byron.
“Detective, I’ve tried to impress on you that whoever is writing these letters,” Byron let that thought linger on the line for a moment, “whoever is writing these letters is more than just some ‘nut’. Consider the exactness of detail, the precision of location and nature of the wounds. And consider, detective, that each letter was mailed the day before each murder.”
“We’ve gone over that before,” Caffran said. “Which goes to show that the nut writing these letters is our killer. These sort of sickos do that, write letters so they can brag about their murders. There was that torso killer out in Cleveland who used to taunt Eliot Ness in the papers…”
Byron sighed. He wasn’t about to get into his own perspective, that it would be impossible for any killer, however clever, to accurately predict the exact details the writer depicted in his letters. Caffran had no use for the ‘prescience’ theories Byron had put forward. All he wanted were the letters in hopes he could use them to find his murderer.
“I won’t get into a debate about your theories and mine,” Byron said. “But before I tell you about this letter, I want to request a slight consideration from the homicide bureau.”
“Which is?” Caffran asked, suspicion fairly dripping from the phone.
“I want to be admitted to the crime scene when you locate it,” Byron said.
A bark of laughter rose from Caffran. “Might do you some good at that, ghost-chaser! It’ll give you a new take on things when you see for yourself what this pen-pal of yours has been writing about!”
*
The room was exactly as the letter had described it, right down to the peeling wallpaper and the mottled green carpet. The more interesting detail, of course, was now covered discretely by a pair of blankets, two chunks of meat that had only recently been a man.
Byron looked away from the covered body and turned towards the wall. Detective Caffran, a short but broad-shouldered man with a pug-nose and a right ear that looked like it had been a Gila monster’s chew-toy, disengaged himself from a discussion with the county coroner to saunter over and jeer at Byron’s apparent squeamishness.
“Not so pretty in real life, is it?” Caffran scoffed. “You might have a little pull with the chief, but that don’t rate with me. I’ve seen plenty of eggheads like you, all stuffed with letters from universities but not a lick of experience to make it mean anything. Put a guy like you out in the field and you go to pieces like that.” He leaned in and snapped his fingers beside Byron’s head.
Byron turned slo
wly, feigning surprise at finding Caffran beside him, as though the snap of his fingers was the first notice he’d taken of the detective. “I must apologize. I was studying the pattern the blood has made along the wall. I didn’t know you needed me.”
The detective grimaced, annoyed by Byron’s impertinence. “You were studying the blood stains, were you?”
“Quite interesting, wouldn’t you agree?” Byron said. He waved his hand at the wall, indicating the splash of crimson. “Look at the way…”
“An axe will do that,” Caffran interrupted. “The murderer severed a mess of arteries when he chopped his victim.”
Byron turned and shook his head. “An axe? That is what you think did this damage?”
Caffran smiled and nodded. “An axe,” he repeated. “Not some ghost. In the hands of a maniac, an axe can do a lot of damage.”
“Like cutting a man in half?” Byron pointed again at the wall. “Can an axe throw blood across the wall in exactly the same pattern written about in a letter mailed the day before the murder? Notice that landscape hanging there, how the blood stains only the lower corner, leaving the mountains and the cacti untouched. Exactly as described in the letter.”
Byron turned away and began examining the rest of the room, studying the contents of the old pinewood dresser beside the steel-frame bed, inspecting the few books and bric-a-brac on the set of shelves standing in one corner. Caffran watched him for a time, an expression of contemptuous amusement on his face.
“Think you’ll find a spook hiding with the socks?” the detective laughed.
“Just looking,” Byron said. “Trying to find some connection between these murders. Some shared link.”
Whether the murderer was a ghost or a maniac, Byron knew there had to be some connection between the victims. If it was simply a mortal madman as Caffran insisted, then there had to be some common thread that made him choose his victims. Something had to have made these people the targets of the man’s psychosis.