Mister October - Volume Two

by Edited by Christopher Golden

  “Let me go! Let me go!” she screamed. Mitya grunted and ripped at her shirt, sending the buttons flying. Esme felt his big hands on her body and struggled madly, pounding on him with her fists. He pushed his face into hers and kissed her again, openmouthed and smothering. Her stomach heaved.

  She felt something hard in her pocket. She reached in and pulled out her crystal ball. With all the force of fear and desperation, she swung it into the side of his head.

  He groaned and rolled to one side, pulling Esme with him. She wrenched herself free and rolled away. Mitya was bleeding where she had hit him, and his face was slack. She knelt over him. A blind fury overcame her, and she smashed his face with the crystal, over and over, until the crystal broke in half. One edge sliced her palm.

  The pain brought her back to her senses. Mitya’s face was pulped, the eyes crushed, the forehead caved in. Esme put her head on his chest and listened for a heartbeat. She heard nothing.

  Terror rushed in. If the soldiers found out she had killed their lieutenant, she would die horribly. She went to the kitchen and washed her bloody face and hands, and rinsed the crystal halves, slipping them back into her pocket. She changed her ruined shirt and took Mitya’s cap to hide her hair.

  Then she took a last look around the ravaged apartment.

  “Auf wiedersehen, she whispered. Her eyes filled with tears.

  She slipped out into the street and worked her way west, toward the American forces.

  * * *

  After a day of hiding, scuttling, and climbing through rubble, Esme found an American checkpoint. She tossed away Mitya’s cap and put her hands up. She screamed out that she was an orphan and all alone. “Please don’t hurt me!”

  One American seemed to understand and approached her kindly, even as she shook for fear they would shoot her, or worse. “Hi there, girlie,” he said, smiling with compassion. Esme flung her arms around him with a surge of relief. He laughed, and brought her to their camp, where a man who wore a white armband with a red cross on it brought her to the hospital tent. He bandaged the gash in her palm. The nurses found Esme a hot meal, a clean cot and even a dress.

  The American soldier who found her was named Lieutenant Howland. He visited her in the hospital tent, and she began to trust him. He taught her a little English, and made her laugh. One day he came to see her, grinning from ear to ear.

  “We’re supposed to send the German orphans to a refugee camp. But I talked it over with the missus back home, and we want to adopt you. The Red Cross can pull a few strings and get you sent home in a day or two. What do you think of that?”

  Esme stared dumbly at him. She reached into her coat pocket and felt the crystal halves. They were surprisingly warm to her touch.

  Lieutenant Howland looked anxiously at her, somewhat crestfallen by her stunned reaction. “I mean, if it’s okay with you. Do you want to be our girl?”

  “It is very OK,” she said carefully, in English.

  Esme came home to Texas. Mama and Papa Howland were kind and loving to her, and she loved them with a grateful heart. She went to American high school and learned to speak English with only a trace of an accent. She married, and she and her husband bought a home in the suburbs. She had three children, and never spoke of the horrors of the war. But she kept the broken crystal, wrapped in tissue paper, in her bedside table.

  When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Esme felt an urgent pull in her heart. Her children were aghast when she announced that she was traveling to Germany—alone. Brushing aside their objections, she went, taking the crystal ball, and the first thing she did when she got there was to find the house at 27, Metzer Strasse.

  It was still there, repaired in an ugly way by the East German government. A steel door replaced the old glass-and-wood door she remembered. Heavy curtains hung in the windows of her old apartment, and the outer stonework still bore scars from the shellings. But the stone steps leading up to the entry were exactly as they had always been.

  Esme sighed, and reached into her purse and pulled out the crystal ball. She placed the two halves on the bottom step. The broken edges glittered in the sun. She stared at them, and a refracted sunbeam caught one edge, sending a beam of white light into her eyes. In the blinding light, images formed. She saw Ruth, with a hundred other women, naked and clawing at the walls as the gas filled the chamber. She saw Mitya’s body being carried down these very steps. She saw a graveyard, a hero’s funeral, and a young boy weeping. She saw Mrs. Schmidt, shot dead as she tried to scale the wall to the West. She saw Erik, living comfortably as an apparatchik of the Stasi. Finally, she saw a young girl with long blond braids standing alone in the middle of a blasted apartment.

  “You always showed me the past, not the future,” she whispered. “But you saved my life, even so.”

  She picked up one half of the crystal. Then she walked away, leaving the other half behind, shining on the step.

  GHOST TRAP

  By Rick Hautala

  Although it was often part of his job, Jeff Stewart hadn’t been expecting to find a body today. It was Saturday morning, and he was doing some diving for his friend and drinking buddy, Mel “Biz” Potter. A storm had passed through the night before, and they were looking for some of Biz’s lobster pots that had broken off their buoy ropes in the rough seas. Locals called such lost traps “ghost traps” when they lay on the bottom of the ocean where a lobster could still scuttle inside. If more than one lobster ended up in a trap, the bigger, stronger one would kill and eat the others, but that only prolonged its captivity until—eventually—it died of starvation.

  Even on the sunniest day, there was no light down as deep as Jeff was. Today, following the storm, the sky was as gray as soot, the seas choppy. Even at six or seven fathoms, Jeff could feel the powerful tug of the tide. He’d agreed to help Biz out—like he did once or twice a summer—for the comradeship and the simple pleasure that diving gave him. No matter how much Marcie, his girlfriend, bitched about him screwing around on the one day of the week they had to spend together, Jeff took advantage of any and all excuses to dive. He relished the freedom, the sense of weightlessness and total isolation.

  His day job was working search, rescue, and recovery for the U.S. Coast Guard, so Jeff had seen more than his fair share of drowned bodies…“sinkers,” as he and his co-workers called them. When this one came into view, illuminated by the diffused beam of Jeff’s underwater light, he couldn’t help but be startled.

  Most drowning victims, if you found them soon enough—say within twenty-four to forty-eight hours, before the lobsters, crabs, and other scavengers scurrying around on the bottom of the ocean started to consume the dead meat—ended up the same way. Once they were dead, the blood pooled in their rumps and lower legs, weighing them down so they were sitting on the ocean floor with their legs splayed out in front of them. Their arms invariably would be raised and extended, like they were reaching for something to cling to … something solid so they could hoist themselves back up to the surface.

  In all his years of diving, the one thing Jeff had never been able to get over—the single most fascinating thing—was the dead person’s face … especially the eyes. Once the blood drained out of the head and upper body, and settled into the lower trunk, the puckered skin turned as white and translucent as marble. Winding traces of veins stood out like faded tattoos just beneath the skin. Of course, someone with darker skin wouldn’t be as white as alabaster, but the effect—at least on every body Jeff had ever recovered—was as fascinating as it was gruesome. The eyes—if some sea creatures hadn’t gotten at them yet—would be wide open and staring with an expression of stunned surprise. It was as if the victim still couldn’t believe he or she had actually drowned.

  But it was one thing when Jeff was fifty or more feet below the surface of the ocean looking for a drowning victim. Finding one when he wasn’t ready for it sent a startled rush through him, like an electric jolt to the groin. He drew back involuntarily, waving his arms and kickin
g his legs to keep his orientation. His heart was pounding like a drop forge hammer, and a thick, salty pressure throbbed behind his eyes. The flashlight almost slipped from his hand, but he clutched it tightly. After the initial shock began to subside, he trained the beam back onto the drowned man. Kicking easily and still trying to force himself to calm down, he approached slowly.

  Judging by the clothes on the corpse, he looked like he’d been down here quite a while. Tattered remnants of a plaid work shirt and protective yellow rubber coveralls—something all lobstermen wore when working—were covered with thick strands of green slime and were rotting away. The man was sitting with his legs out in front of him, his toes pointing upward. Jagged black shreds of rubber boots still clung to his feet and lower legs. His arms were extended and swaying from side to side like thick fronds of kelp moved by the deep-sea currents. The man’s hands were extended, his fingers hooked. Long yellowed fingernails looking like chipped, old porcelain stuck out from the ends of the withered, bone-white hands.

  Jeff couldn’t help but think the man looked like he had been waiting patiently for him … or someone … to come along and find him in the darkness seven fathoms below the surface.

  Tiny pinpricks of light squiggled across Jeff’s vision. He realized he was still breathing too fast for safety and consciously slowed his breathing. He willed his racing pulse to slow down while he considered who this might be … what might have happened … and how long he’d been underwater. To the best of his knowledge, no one had gone missing at sea recently. This man might have been swept overboard during the recent storm and not been reported missing yet, but the condition of his clothes and skin seemed to eliminate that as a possibility. The only people who’d been lost at sea so far this summer season had been a couple of lobstermen out of Vinalhaven, whose bodies had washed up on The Nephews, an island due east of The Cove. Jeff didn’t know of anyone else who’d gone missing.

  As he drew nearer, Jeff noticed something peculiar. There was something wrapped around the man’s waist. It was difficult to tell what, lost as it was in the dark folds of slime and the man’s rotting clothes, but it looked like the heavy links of a chain. Following it outward, Jeff found one end of the chain tied to a cement block. Barnacles encrusted the corroded iron and cement block, further evidence that whoever this was, he had been down here for a long, long time.

  It finally dawned on him that what was bothering him was something about the man’s eyes.

  They shouldn’t still be there in his head.

  No matter how long or short a time someone had been under water, the eyes were the first to go. Fish and crabs and other ocean scavengers went after the softest, juiciest parts first. Every corpse Jeff had ever found within a day or two of drowning had a blank, lifeless stare that was unnerving in its own right. The eyelids shrank and pulled back, so the corpses always had a look of wide-eyed surprise. After a few days or weeks, the eyeballs would be gone, leaving nothing but empty sockets.

  But this man’s eyes were still intact even though he had clearly been underwater long enough for barnacles to attach to the chain and the cement block holding him down.

  After swimming around the corpse, taking a last good look at it, Jeff tilted his head back, gave a few powerful kicks, and started back to the surface. He made sure he rose slowly, keeping pace with the bubbles of his exhaled breath. When he broke the surface, he swept his mask back and tore the regulator from his mouth. Biz’s boat was less than fifty feet away from where Jeff’s diving marker bobbed up and down in the steep swells. He raised a hand and waved while shouting until Biz saw him and started up his engine. Jeff clung to his diving marker until Biz pulled up alongside him and cut the engine.

  “Toss me a rope,” Jeff said, gasping so hard it hurt his throat. He took in a mouthful of seawater and spit it out. “I gotta go back down.”

  Biz regarded his quizzically for a moment or two, but he didn’t say a word before darting to the cabin and returning with a coil of rope.

  “You find a ghost trap?” Biz asked as he leaned over the side rails and handed the rope to Jeff.

  “Worse ‘n that,” Jeff said. He took in another mouthful of water and couldn’t help but swallow some.

  Biz’s frown deepened.

  “There’s someone down there,” Jeff said.

  At first, Biz reacted like he wasn’t sure what Jeff meant. Then his eyes widened and he said, “You mean you found a person?”

  Jeff nodded grimly.

  “I wanna mark him so’s we can come back out ‘n’ find ‘im easily. We gotta report this to the state.”

  “For fuck’s sake,” Biz said. He didn’t look at all pleased to be involved in anything like this, but Jeff ignored him as he fumbled to get the regulator back into his mouth and pulled his mask down. After adjusting everything, he tied one end of the rope to his diving marker and uncoiled the rope. With one last look at Biz, he did a quick surface dive. As he dropped back down into the depths, his heart felt like a cold, tight fist in his chest.

  * * *

  “I’ll betcha I know exactly who it is.”

  Like most nights, Jeff was drinking with his buddies down at The Local. He had a glass of beer—his fifth so far tonight—raised halfway to his mouth when Jim “Pappy” Sullivan spoke up. He hadn’t even realized Pappy was listening as he told three of his drinking buddies—Ralph, Johnny, and Flip—about what he’d found this morning. Lowering the glass to the bar, Jeff nudged his Red Sox baseball cap back on his head and turned on his bar stool to look directly at Pappy.

  “You do, do yah?”

  “Ay-yuh. Sure as shit.”

  A wide smile of satisfaction spread across the old man’s face. Pappy relished being the center of attention even though he had a reputation for being full of shit as often as not. Now that he had Jeff and everyone else’s attention, he seemed to wait for a cue to continue. When the wait got too long to bear, Jeff said, “So … you wanna tell me?”

  Pappy grinned from ear to ear, exposing the row of missing teeth on his bottom jaw.

  “I’ll bet my left nut-sack you found Old Man Crowther.”

  “I don’t want your fuckin’ left nut-sack,” Jeff said, smirking, “but what makes you so goddamned sure it’s Old Man Crowther?”

  “How long’s he been missing?” Pappy said.

  “Damned if I know,” Jeff said. “I don’t even know who the fuck he is.”

  An unlit cigarette was stuck behind Pappy’s right ear, held in place by a snarl of wiry gray hair. He’d probably bummed it from the barmaid, Shantelle. He reached up and took it, rolling it between his grease-stained fingers as he nodded toward the barroom’s back door.

  “Step on outside with me whilst I have a smoke,” he said, sliding off his barstool. “‘N’ I’ll tell yah.” He paused, cocking his hips to one side as he fished in his jeans pocket for his lighter. “Goddamned fucking law that won’t let me smoke in a bar. Like I come here for my goddamned health!”

  While this was going on, Jeff glanced back and forth between his friends. They seemed to have no opinion as to what he should do, so he picked up his beer and followed Pappy out the back door. Out back of The Local was a deck that looked out over the harbor. The screen door slammed shut behind them, sounding like a gunshot in the night. The sound made Jeff jump, and he wondered why he was so keyed up. He had enough beer in him to feel convivial, but he was still a little freaked out by what he had found this morning.

  By the light of the moon, which was almost full and shining brightly, and the streetlights lining the road leading down to the wharf, Jeff could see the lobster boats at their moorings. Pappy lit up his cigarette and, leaning forward with both elbows resting on the railing, clasped his hands in front of him as though in prayer. The cigarette dangled from his lower lip, sending up a thin curl of smoke that made him squint. Moths and June bugs buzzed around the single light by the back door, snapping and popping against the screen.

  “So tell me … Who the fuck is Old Man
Crowther, and why’re you so sure it’s him?”

  Pappy inhaled and blew a billow of smoke from his nostrils without taking the cigarette from his mouth.

  “Got to be ‘im,” he said, the glowing tip of the cigarette bobbing up and down like a firefly in the darkness.

  “This sinker I found—he had a length of chain wrapped around his waist. You’re saying Old Man Crowther tossed himself overboard, that he killed himself?”

  “Sure as shit seems so, don’t it?” Pappy puffed some more on his cigarette as though lost in thought.

  “Well, we’ll find out tomorrow when we bring ‘im up, won’t we? But how long’s this Old Man Crowther been missing?”

  Pappy tilted his head to one side and scratched the white beard stubble on his jowls. His fingernails made a loud rasping sound

  “Oh, I’d say it must’a been … maybe thirty years or more since he disappeared?”

  “Thirty years ago … I was still in high school,” Jeff said. “A body can’t last that long down under.”

  “May’ve been even longer’n that, now that I think of it.” Pappy turned to Jeff, scowling as threads of smoke rose into his face. “T’was back in the early Seventies, as I recall.”

  Jeff considered for a long, silent moment. Pappy finally took the cigarette from his mouth after taking another deep drag and exhaling.

  Jeff pursed his lips and shook his head. “No way,” he said. “Can’t be him. Someone been down there that long, their body’d be long gone. He’d a’ been ‘et by scavengers long ago.”

  Pappy smiled and shook his head as he took one last drag of the cigarette and then snapped the butt out into the darkness. Jeff watched it fly, spinning end over end until it hit the ground in a small shower of sparks.

  “I saw the body that’s down there,” Jeff said. “’N’ there’s no fuckin’ way anyone’d be in that good a condition after thirty years.”