Occult Detective

by Emby Press

  Then the air stirred with smoke and shadows and the scent of sulphur and spice.

  The dame normally spelled trouble, but, this time, I dared to let myself think she just might spell salvation.

  Ixquitil jumped back. His obsidian shoes made a fingernails-on-the-chalkboard screech that went through my ears like an ice pick.

  The summoning got the drop on him, but he did recover fast, have to give him that. He let go of his watch chain, and grabbed for his pig-iron heater. It had a barrel so elongated you had to wonder what he was compensating for.

  “Nisinope?” he yelped.

  Her answer was to drive one darkness-sheathed scarlet fist into his chin, a vicious uppercut that cleaned his clock but good. He got off a shot that went wild, pinging off a girder. Then Ixquitil was down, his goons and fancy boys rushed to join the fray, and the party really started.

  While Matt Brimstone, P.I., the guest of honor at this surprise shindig, sat in the middle of it, struggling with the cuffs and ropes and chains as punches flew.

  Punches flew all right, as did Ecto-bullets, crates, bottles, bodies, scorpions…the works.

  I forgot about trying to get myself loose and started concentrating on not getting myself dead in the crossfire. If it had to happen, fine. So sue me if I just didn’t want it to happen yet.

  One of the goons landed right in front of me, groaning. I wrenched my legs and delivered a satisfying kick to the side of his head. Satisfying, that was, until the violent motion rocked my chair, tipping me over.

  My afterlife flashed before my eyes, ending with a vision of my head connecting with the warehouse floor. Neck broken, skull shattered, brains oozing out like glops of overcooked oatmeal. The end of my spirit-body, followed by recarnation into some lower form.

  Not the way I wanted to go.

  I twisted as well as I could on the way down and took the impact on my side. Slam and crunch. Splintering wood. Pain from the chain cinching tight around my ribs. Cuffs gouging at my wrists. The pop of gristle as my shoulder dislocated, accompanied by an elbow bending a direction it hadn’t been meant to bend.

  Did I holler? Did I cuss? Did I ever, and how!

  Then I was on the floor, tangled and still partly tied to the splintered wreckage of the chair. The goon sprawled nearby, already reviving. His chitin-plated chest and head didn’t give me any sort of a target, but the exposed underjowls of his greenish neck did. I knew I’d regret it later but went for it anyway…with my teeth.

  The taste? Brother, you don’t want to know. I’d tasted worse—had to escape a burning tenement in Pit-of-Despair Acres once by jumping down a drain pipe and crawling through the Mephistopolis sewers for the length of a football field—but this was still bad enough to momentarily make me forget all about my shoulder.

  But it did the trick. The goon flopped over, staring at the ceiling, a puddle spreading from the ragged hole where his larynx used to be.

  I spat until I made myself dizzy. Would have given whatever was left of my soul right then for a shot of whiskey or a slug of tongue-scalding joe.

  “Matt?” I heard Cinnamon ask as she approached. She sounded genuinely concerned. “Are you—?”

  “Aces, doll-face,” I said. “Had ’em right where I wanted ’em.”

  Then I heaved my groceries, and passed out.

  *

  “If it helps your wounded ego,” she told me later, when we were in my office with a stiff drink apiece, “Cinnamon LaRue had to disappear after that New Year’s Eve, so she never did go on to hit the big-time as a singer.”

  “Aw,” I said, working my arm in circles. She’d popped the shoulder back into its socket for me and it was mending with diabolical speed, but I’d be sore for a while and no mistake. “That’s a real pity. Where’d I leave my violin?”

  “They say she walked in on your confrontation with the killer. Her body was never found. Probably met a grisly end somewhere up in the San Bernardinos. It was quite the sensational story in the local papers.”

  I snorted. “Yeah? So who did they think punched my ticket, then?”

  “Remember the railroad baron with the heiress and the missing necklace? The story goes that you’d found out his real scheme, insurance fraud, and he had to eliminate you.”

  “If that doesn’t just take the biscuit,” I said, disgusted. “Better for my rep than being offed by a nightclub act, but not by much.”

  Cinnamon finished her drink. “I still don’t see what you’re holding a grudge about. You solved the case.”

  “You killed me! And you strolled off with the Hearst Diamond. Fat lot of good it does me to solve the case when I end up dead and you still get away with it.”

  “Matt,” she said, chiding. “I always get away with it. You should know that by now.”

  “Maybe I’m a slow learner,” I said, giving her the eyebrow. “Maybe you should stick around and teach me a thing or two.”

  She tossed her horns and uttered a smoky laugh as she rose from the chair. “Maybe you should count your blessings. Goodbye, Matt.”

  “Seeya, Cinnamon.” I poured myself another, watching her go. At the threshold, she paused and turned, and I have to admit my stomach did a little flip-flop that had nothing to do with the booze.

  “Oh,” she said, reaching into her bag. She pulled out a crumpled wad of slate-grey leather and threw it to me. “I found your hat.”

  And then, with a final flick of her tail, my favorite bit of trouble in the shape—and what a shape!—of a dame walked right out of my afterlife again.

  AN UNANCHORED MAN

  Tim Prasil

  “Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting

  That would not let me sleep; methought, I lay

  Worse than the mutines in the bilboes.”

  —Hamlet

  The breadth of a book would be needed to properly recount the investigation of the Morley mansion haunting. Undoubtedly, it was the most complex and dangerous case that I shared with Vera Van Slyke to that date, which was October of 1903. In the wake of this adventure, however, Vera and I had an experience that, while less complicated, far better illustrates the remarkable expanse of the spirit dimension. As we were in Boston, we decided to take advantage of our nearness to Cape Cod and devote a week to relaxation. Few tourists remained in the seaside town of Granger, and I imagined its unoccupied beach would provide me with a tranquil setting for reading. True to her nature, Vera was more interested in the seafood—and the beer.

  “I’m hoping we might hunt down some of this town’s music, too,” she said as we unpacked our bags in the hotel room. “These maritime towns are filled with local musicians who play rousing sea shanties and melancholy airs. It must be the Irish blood in me that explains my affection for such music.”

  Playfully, I grabbed a bedpost and steadied myself against it. “Mercy—I’m shocked!” I jested. “You’ve let slip something about your family!”

  Vera tilted her head and stared. She then turned to me. “Have I never mentioned that my mother was Irish?”

  I grinned. “Not in the four years that I’ve known you.”

  She resumed transferring her clothes to a dresser drawer. “About as Irish as they come, I’d say! As a young girl, she left County Sligo, fleeing the Great Famine. Met my father in upstate New York. At bedtime, she used to sing me the old songs.”

  “That’s very sweet,” I said, sitting on the edge of the bed. “Not everyone has a mother like that. Did she also tell you those ghost stories you said you loved as a girl?”

  “You might think so, given how the Irish love a spooky yarn. But, no, I found those on my own. In fact, my mother admonished me regularly about what she called ‘yar pookas an’ yar bahnshees’.”

  I chuckled. “I shouldn’t have brought it up. We’re here to get away from our pookas and our banshees for a while.”

  Once unpacking was finished, we asked the hotel clerk where we might find some musical entertainment for the evening. We had missed the last of a ser
ies of band concerts held on the town common, he said. Scratching his neck, he added that amateur musicians sometimes gathered to imbibe and play together at a waterfront tavern called Scully’s. The clerk suddenly straightened his posture and clarified that we should go there only if accompanied by men. He insisted that it was no place for two women traveling alone.

  “Two women traveling alone, sir,” snarled Vera, “is an error in basic mathematics! Scully, if I’m not mistaken, is an Irish name, suggesting this tavern is exactly the type of place I have in mind. You will write down the address, thank you kindly!”

  Bowing in penitence, the clerk obeyed orders.

  That evening, I learned the hotel clerk might have been doing the honorable thing by cautioning us against this establishment. It was located in a section of town rarely revealed to tourists, an area where the buildings gasped for paint and the railroad tracks beside them choked on high weeds. The tavern’s interior was almost as unwelcoming. Granted, the darkly stained walls and the crisscrossed oars hanging on them had a certain rustic charm. Still, the few conversations being held by patrons ceased as we looked for a place to sit. We were silently observed as we chose one of the few tables in the place. Most of the customers sat upon stools along the bar, and they continued to gawk at us from there.

  “What can I get you, ladies?” called the bartender. He was a burly man with a heavy, black beard. Nonetheless, his dapper vest and collar showed that he was no brute.

  “Bring us two of your finest beers please,” Vera returned. “Let’s see if you New Englanders can brew an ale that’s as hearty as the ones back in Chicago.” She winked at me.

  I very much hoped that Vera’s friendly challenge would be received as more friendly than challenge. The bartender grinned, and the other patrons began to lose interest in us. I noticed then that one elderly gentleman had paid us no mind at all. He sat by himself at a rear table, facing the back wall. His sparse, white hair and lopsided slouch were the only bits of information he was divulging about himself.

  “My brother runs cargo through Chicago,” explained the barman with a fine, baritone voice. As he delivered our beers, he added, “Prefers the lakes to the oceans. He was always the dainty tea cup of the family, you see.” His smirk revealed that he had accepted Vera’s invitation to a verbal fencing match.

  “I do see,” Vera returned. “However, this establishment was recommended, not for what I would see, but for what I might hear. Is it true that there’s a chance of some music being played at some point?”

  “Oh, you flatter me! It’s not often I get asked to take my concertina off the wall. If you’re lucky, a few of my regulars will play louder on their own instruments. But none of them have arrived just yet.”

  The gentleman then introduced himself as Scully. It was a nickname he gave himself after—as he phrased it—“demolishing some very fine Harvard boys in a sculling race one weekend in Cambridge.” When Vera inquired about his true name, he introduced himself as Marcelo Silva. I chuckled at Vera’s pursed lips when Mr. Silva explained his ancestors had sailed from Portugal, not the Emerald Island.

  “And as we’re so cozy with one another now,” Mr. Silva continued, “may I ask what brings you two landlubbers to the east?”

  Perhaps I had been too eager to join in the conversation. “We came to investigate certain reports in Boston,” I told him.

  Mr. Silva cocked his head. “Reports about what?”

  One by one, the patrons at the bar began to turn back to us, and I noticed Vera sigh.

  In a flurry, I searched for a way to avoid the very subject that Vera and I had come here to escape. “Oh, uh. We. Well. We—investigate hauntings. Ghosts and that.” I winced.

  When I reopened my eyes, I was met with the blank faces and undivided attention of everyone at the bar. Indeed, Mr. Silva pulled over a chair and sat down. With a grin, Vera shrugged. I knew that I would have to relate the whole story of the haunting of the Morley mansion. Truth be told, I rather enjoyed the intrigue I stirred in my audience, who inched closer and closer during my narrative. The stupefied silence following my finale was more gratifying than applause. I had even managed to get a few backward glances from the elderly man so determined to avoid being disturbed.

  Though there was much debate over the veracity of my tale, Vera and I became the guests of honor. We were treated to more beers than I care to admit. Once the bartender’s musical “regulars” arrived, we were granted an evening of rousing sea shanties and melancholy airs. The small crowd escorted us safely back to our hotel, much to the consternation of the same desk clerk who had regretted ever mentioning the place to us.

  The following morning, I awoke with a headache. Vera suggested we enjoy some ocean air, and we went to the shore fronting the hotel. She wandered off to seek low-tide treasures while I remained sitting on the hotel veranda to read. My novel, though, turned out to be frustratingly jumbled and broody. A young man with dreams of going to sea finds work on a whaler, one whose capricious captain is driven by extracting revenge against the sea beast who lost him his leg. Instead, I had been hoping for swashbuckling pirates in pursuit of hidden jewels. My eyes drifted from the pages to the waves.

  And I jolted when a scratchy voice blasted beside me.

  “What potions have I drunk of Siren tears,” snarled a white-bearded man. Though he chortled, his scarcity of teeth failed to add much whimsy to the odd comment.

  First, I realized that the reference to a siren might have directed to myself. Next, I recognized the man from his sideways slouch. He stood as if he were a sack of grain that someone had barely managed to balance upright.

  I said, “You startled me, sir! Aren’t you the—uh—the gentlemen who drank alone—uhm—who was with us at Scully’s last evening?”

  He nodded. “That was myself, missy—but there’s need to be startled,” he said, the soft r in his last word revealing a strong New England accent. “I’m not much for manners, I s’pose. It’s just—I’m curious about that experience ya spoke of. The ghosts there in Boston. I come by to tell ya—that is—I wanted ya to know—” He stopped there and suddenly looked down at his boots.

  As he was not sitting down, I thought it best to join him standing. I asked, “To know what, sir?”

  He looked up, and my new position allowed me to see that his eyes were dim with age. The dark, deep-wrinkled frames around those eyes implied it was not time but experience that accounted for his state of physical collapse.

  “To know that I believe ya. I believe that ya tangled with ghosts up there.” He nodded again. “I believe because I myself have ghosts. The marauders come charging through my cottage some nights. Lately, it’s been all nights, and that’s why ya found me out among folks. Drive me out of my own bed, they do! I come looking to see if ya got some chant or such to send ’em back into the sea.” Slowly, he nodded yet again.

  Something about his demeanor gave me a chill. I snapped shut my book, startling myself again in the process. “Well, the woman you saw me with last night is the one to consult. She’s the expert. I simply assist.” I smiled as best I could.

  I waved and called to Vera, perhaps with more urgency than was polite. She waved back and began to tromp through the sand toward us. I was both dismayed and pleased that she did not take the time to put her shoes back on her feet.

  The man beside me rubbed his pocked nose and then looked down at his boots again. He muttered, “I ain’t like that fella in your tale of the mansion. I ain’t a millionaire.”

  The obviousness of this fact evoked a pang of sympathy in me. “You needn’t worry about paying us. If Miss Van Slyke feels she can help, she will do so. My name is Lucille Parsell. And how shall I introduce you?”

  Once Vera arrived, I introduced her to Captain Henry Thorn Lord. I glimpsed her lips tighten instantly upon hearing his professional title. Rigidly, she offered her hand. She then remained silent. As the captain seemed unpracticed in social amenities, I told Vera what little I knew about his haunted
cottage. I emphasized how his ghosts charged around the place, even chasing him out, and I suggested to Vera that this might be our first chance to witness what Catherine Crowe terms a poltergeist in her famous guide to ghosts.

  “Well, then,” Vera replied, “the case is certainly of interest. Shall we discuss the details over lunch? I’m told there’s a lovely restaurant just across the—”

  “I ain’t hungry,” Captain Lord interrupted bluntly. These were the first words he spoke to her. Clearly, he was unaware of the danger of keeping Vera Van Slyke from her lunch.

  She merely raised her eyebrows, however. After slowly smoothing one of those eyebrows with her little finger, Vera said, “We can as easily begin our inquiry here.” She sat down on the veranda railing.

  I considered resuming my seat, but as the captain remained standing, I felt I should, too. Though it was entirely likely that our new client’s refusal of lunch was more a matter of affordability than appetite, his unapologetic manner had been nonetheless disconcerting. I discreetly slid closer to Vera.

  “Lucille says your ghosts charge through your cottage? Are they visible, then?”

  “No, can’t see ’em. But ya feel ’em shaking the floor like one of those earthquakes out on the West Coast. Knock the lamps over, they do, and shake the dust from the rafters. Even a chain of trolling hooks I had fixed firm above my fireplace come down!”

  “And this occurs randomly rather than, say, only on windy nights?” asked Vera.

  “Ain’t a single natch’ral explanation for it,” the captain lamented. “As I asked the missy here, I’m hoping ya have a spell to drive ’em back to the sea. I’m fond of the little cottage. Think of it as my final port and that.”

  “There are no magical spells for evicting ghosts, Mr. Lord, but we might be able to help you. I have one pivotal question, though. Throughout your sailing career, were you primarily a fisherman—or did you transport cargo? If the latter, was your cargo ever of African origin and sold at auction?”