by Noel Hynd
Deservedly, thought Van Allen. Then he examined the particulars of the case. Once again, profit had been the motive. And once again, the dumb-assed robbers had found themselves sitting in jail, not a penny richer for their troubles.
Grave robbery. The literature on the subject was meager.
In another book, Van Allen found a case from New York City in 1826. A Dr. William Senfelt had been sentenced to seven years in prison for hiring immigrants to steal fresh bodies from an unnamed “Negro burying grounds near the Battery.” Dr. Senfelt had wanted the corpses for medical experiments and research on human anatomy, or so he had claimed in court. Senfelt served two years of his sentence and apparently never was heard from again, at least not in New York.
Van Allen sighed. He was grasping at straws. All he was finding were isolated cases with predictable motivation. Not that it wasn’t strange stuff.
In another book, for example:
Disinterment. St. Louis, Missouri. 1898. A saloonkeeper of apparently sullen and quarrelsome temperament was murdered by one of his customers, the identity of whom remained unknown. Three days after the barkeep’s burial, his ghost was reported wandering the streets of the city at night, turning over property and frightening horses.
A priest was called. A mass was given “to drive out the demon” that was believed to be in the corpse. When that didn’t work, some upstanding citizens got together, dug up the corpse with shovels, and attacked it directly. A former Confederate Army medic, who was now a local butcher, was given the duty of cutting the heart out of the corpse. The doctor’s knowledge of anatomy turned out to be somewhat sketchy as he couldn’t locate the heart. So he rummaged around through various intestines until a “truly foule (sic) and odious smell came forthe (sic) from the remains,” causing such a stench that the entire body ended up being tossed on a makeshift funeral pyre later that evening. The pyre, in turn, ignited the neyghboring (sic) house …
Van Allen stopped reading as the account of a grave robbery transformed into an account of a municipal fire. He flipped pages. This stuff was stranger than some of the stuff that happened in his station house. Maybe contemporary man didn’t have any sort of lock on weirdness, after all. He found another lively section in the same book:
Grigory Rasputin, the Mad Monk who had been advisor to Czar Nicholas II, was cornered by Bolshevik conspirators in Petrograd on December 28, 1916. He was beaten, shot and stabbed. But, according to those who murdered him, his body was still flailing when it was dumped into a hole in the ice in the frozen River Neva. Three days later, his frozen body was disinterred from its icy grave and paraded around before cheering revolutionaries…
Van Allen sighed and went onward. He waded through a short history of modern burial techniques, particularly one detailing the breathtaking casualness with which Europeans discarded the remains of the dead. He found an article published by a French historian named Maurice DeMaison who had written in the early nineteen hundreds. The article focused on the Parisian cemetery of Les Saints Innocents which was established in the Middle Ages and closed in 1780.
The cemetery was a sprawling sector of land, adjacent to a small church. Its management, if it could be called that, typified the practices of the day.
Remains did not linger at Les Innocents. The cemetery’s fame derived from the qualities of its soil, which were said to reduce a body to bare bones within a day. When the process was complete, or maybe sooner, the remains were disinterred to make way for a fresh corpse. The bones were moved to a “charnel house” where disjointed skeletons were piled up for the public to come and admire.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
cheerfully wrote DeMaison,
Les Innocents was a successful place of commerce, where merchants set up shops and where strollers might pass the time, same as they might at Palais Royale. There were several successful charnel houses in Paris before the Revolution, and two lasted well until the Second Empire, until closed by order of the Bishop of Paris…
Van Allen was getting tired. He turned in three of the books and went for coffee. He returned half an hour later and continued, though a certain veil of exhaustion was starting to descend upon him.
He found another curious section in the final book he examined, a meditation upon the ways Western culture had re-examined its relationship with its dead starting in the middle of the eighteenth century. Moldering tombs and dank crypts gave way to burials in churchyards and even for those wealthy enough who wished to lie for eternity with the saints within the stone foundations of churches.
But by the late seventeen hundreds, many churches had had experiences with noxious fumes and diseases emanating from under-the-church burial yards.
The book cited a case in Virginia where the pastor of a Charlottesville church and twenty-one parishioners fell fatally ill after a body, only nine months in the ground, was accidentally unearthed by grave diggers.
A feeling took hold that the noxious dead should be moved away from the living as far as reasonable, for public health reasons if no other. Subsequently, the concept was born of the modem cemetery, a tidy burial ground usually at the edge of the city limits. The word “graveyard,” for example, didn’t enter the English language until the 1820’s. And for the first time in Western Christian history, the remains of the dead no longer huddled around churches.
Van Allen rubbed his eyes. He had had enough for one day. He flipped forward in the final book and his eyes gravitated to a section that someone had highlighted.
Nearby, the librarians were readying to close the annex. Meanwhile, he read quickly some ruminations from some writer — probably now long dead, Van Allen reasoned — from several decades earlier.
The effects of death are horrific, but immortality redeems them. Yet, we’ve turned the consolation of immortality into another source of horror. For us, the notion that death is not the end, that the dead are among us in spirit, is terrifying. If the dead sprout choir robes and white wings, as they do in newspaper cartoons, all is well. But what if their bodies or their spirits really could return? What if they can walk through walls, move things, and affect the living?
If we deny afterlife, we get what solace we can from the prospect of a painless oblivion. Yet what if — like most cultures in the world — we suggest that a living death might exist? Then the souls of the departed may haunt us, as will the prospect of a loss of Christian faith.
Van Allen closed the book and spent several moments in long, difficult thought. For some reason, he thought of an advertising tag line that he had seen several years earlier on a movie poster for Pet Semetary.
Sometimes dead is better, read the line.
“Sometimes?” he asked himself. “Why not ‘always’?”
But then again, he attempted to reason, the tag line was nothing more than a mid-1980’s marketing gimmick. A catchy phrase relying on the proper flow of words to sell a movie to a public that was anxious to be scared, then quickly reassured, over the course of a hundred ten minutes.
Van Allen, on the other hand, was working on a real criminal case in which a corpse was missing from a tomb. What Van Allen had before him wasn’t a book and wasn’t a movie. It was an actual situation.
Now, for the first time in this case, a deep shudder gripped him. He had always considered himself to be a man who was willing to entertain any new idea, no matter how preposterous.
He began to ask himself questions to which the answers bordered on the unthinkable.
Sometimes dead is better?
Okay, he pondered, what if “dead” doesn’t always mean dead in the way he had always accepted it. The possibility of heaven and hell aside, what if mortal death didn’t always signal the end of one’s earthly involvement?
Mildred Canary trundled past Van Allen’s table. “Five minutes, sir,” she said. “We’re about to close.”
Van Allen nodded, thanked her, and slid the fourth book back to her. But he remained sitting there. Thinking. If he had had anothe
r hour in this place, he thought, he might have done some digging into spirituality.
He methodically replaced the lid on his Mont Blanc and set it down next to his notepad. He thought back, ransacking his own memory. What were his own experiences?
Point: When he had been a boy, he and his entire family had been at the dinner table one evening. They all heard a car on the road by their house. There had been a terrible sound of skidding automobile tires, then a large ugly thump, following quickly by the yelping scream of an animal. They had looked out the window and seen their neighbor’s Dalmatian running away from the sound, running faster than they had ever before seen the old dog move. Then there were the sounds of voices. Animated. Distraught. Twelve-year-old Eddy Van Allen came out of his home with his parents. The body of the dog was lying bloody on the road, exactly where the car had hit it. There were no other Dalmatians in the neighborhood. What, then, had the entire Van Allen family witnessed fleeing the scene of the accident?
Point: When Van Allen had been a teenager, he had been up late one night studying for a high school exam. It had been about 2:00 A.M. Suddenly, he was aware of the strong scent of perfume. Not just perfume, but the specific lilac perfume worn by a favorite aunt. Van Allen looked around, not knowing why his aunt, who lived in nearby Chula Vista, would be in their house. He even rose from his work and looked through the house. The scent of the lilac perfume remained strong. Next day, he learned that she had died the previous evening.
Point: Van Allen’s older brother and sister-in-law had moved into a new home about five years earlier. The home was in the Sherman Oaks. For the first year, they were certain that they heard a baby crying somewhere in the house. But they couldn’t find the source of the sound, and no neighboring house had small children. One day, Van Allen’s brother ran into the man who had previously owned the place. The brother inquired about the noise. The previous owner looked stricken. “Don’t ever ask my wife about this,” the man explained softly. “Our first child died in that house. Crib death, sudden infant death syndrome. That’s why we moved. Too many painful memories. “
And a final point: In his own memory, his estranged wife was still chiding him, dissing him the way only she could, an accusation of failure and ineptitude in every breath. “You never open your mind. You never accept anything new. You’re the sworn enemy of new ideas, Ed.”
“All right, Margaret,” he thought to himself, addressing her in absentia, “here’s one that will tax even you, you post-menopausal witch, so try it on.”
The dead walk among us. They come crashing out of their tombs every once in a while and mingle in with us while we go to the store or get our cars washed. Let me know if you see Billy Carlton, would you? Should be able to recognize him easily. He might not look too healthy; he’s been dead since 1931. And say “hi” for me, and tell him I need him for questioning.
Telepathically he sent this to Margaret.
He waited. No response from Margaret.
Van Allen looked around him. The girl in the red skirt was gone, as was the nervous man with the glasses. Van Allen was the last reader left in the reference room. He rose and left the library.
Van Allen walked out into a cool evening and found his car. In one way, he was convinced that he had wasted several hours of his time. What he had really been looking for, some sort of insight into the mind of a grave robber, had escaped him. Other than the profit motive or the motive of medical research.
He put the key into the ignition and prepared to drive. He would stop first at his office and then take the freeway home to Pasadena.
He watched traffic carefully. It was dark. But what he kept seeing was bright indeed, even though it was in his mind.
It was the trail of debris from Billy Carlton’s coffin coming upward from the earth.
Then this vision flew apart, and he saw another one: that of the huge seraphic tombstone being lifted in the air, as if by some titanic supernatural force bringing it to land sixty feet away in the cemetery.
The thought gave him violent chills. And he saw it in his mind, bright as day, picturing it — he figured — much in the way that it must have happened.
Then, as he drove, he realized that this was what was bothering him. The more he consciously tried to stay away from a certain thought, the more the thought repeated on him. And each time it came back, it did so with increasing urgency.
It wasn’t just that the human remains were missing from Billy Carlton’s tomb. And it wasn’t that he had failed to find something about the minutes of some coven of self-styled witches or Devil worshipers who might have stolen it.
What bothered him was that every shred of evidence from the crime scene suggested that the remains had somehow been propelled upward from within the coffin. That analysis kept formulating itself somewhere inside him and kept taking shape, despite his best efforts to dismiss it.
How was he to explain something like that?
Even if some sicko had used some sort of unusual tool to burrow down to the corpse, how could it have been dragged upward without the skeleton falling apart?
How could the movement of the marker be explained? And why had the grave of Billy Carlton been disturbed? Other graves in the yard were far more accessible.
Then, of course, there were the further logistics of the desecration. How had someone come in and out of San Angelo unobserved? Through locked gates or over high walls? How, in daylight without being seen? How, with equipment, without leaving any tracks?
Van Allen stopped at his office and returned half a dozen phone calls, none of them important. He called Martinez and angled around to find out if anything new or unusual had happened at the cemetery. Nothing had.
He drove home, thinking back to the information he had digested at the public Library.
Sometimes dead is better!
Now there was a thought that pursued him, remaining in his mind all day, like an unpleasant tune. He took it to the next level.
“Yeah? Better than what?” he asked himself again.
He thought back to Champollion, the Frenchman who had solved the mysteries of the Rosetta Stone. Equally, he thought of all the other mysteries that were waiting to be unraveled. If only a man had the right key to the lock.
He made himself dinner and turned on the Lakers. They were back East, hammering the pathetic Knicks. At least Kobe was having a good day, even if Van Allen wasn’t.
He thought a final time of Champollion, and how the man had solved this great mystery of the ancients, only to die prematurely.
There was another uneasy thought, sudden premature death. It stayed with him overnight, woke him at 3:00 A.M., and then was tiptoeing across his subconscious the next morning when he woke at 6:15A.M.
That reminded him of something else.
Since being called to the Cemetery of Angels three days earlier by Martinez, Van Allen had been unable to get one good night’s sleep.
He faced the new day and made a decision. A profit motive of some sort had to have been the motive for the desecration of the grave at San Angelo. Anything else was too horrific even to consider.
Chapter 23
In Fairfield, Connecticut, Sergeant David Chandler was at war with the front right corner of his desk. Thereupon was a small bin for correspondence marked, in a sardonic attempt at humor, with a skull and crossbones.
The bin contained unfinished but open cases. Police investigations that defied closure. Cases that Sergeant Chandler and others had put in weeks upon without results. On the fourth Friday in October, the last Friday before Halloween Saturday, Chandler attempted to make progress against this bin. It was late in the evening, a time when he might have been home with his young family. He was trying to clear old business.
Many of the cases were incidents which he had worked with the local town police: Fairfield, Bridgeport, Norwalk, and Westport. Included were numerous house breakings and car thefts. There was a smaller number of assaults and a pair of bank robberies. As he went through the fil
es, it bothered him that these cases could not be closed. But, as he well knew by now, the world was imperfect.
At a few minutes before eleven o’clock, he came across the last file to be reviewed. It was the Rebecca Moore case from the previous February. Chandler had kept it on his desktop “just in case”
Just in case another such incident occurred.
Just in case he eventually found some new evidence in the incident.
Just in case he eventually swayed from the theory that Mrs. Moore had filed a false police report and no such incident as reported had ever occurred.
Chandler held the file in his hand for several seconds, wondering what to do with it. Of all the files on his desk, he reasoned, this was the one in which further activity was least likely. No parallel incident had occurred anywhere in the area. And the Moores had departed for California during the summer.
Chandler sighed. Here was a candidate for burial in the inactive zone. A prime candidate. He took the folder containing all the paperwork on the Moore case to the main files of the State Police headquarters. He prepared to bury it.
Yet something stayed his hand. If asked, he probably would not have been able to explain why, other than the fact that something about the case had never added up properly. Mrs. Moore had seemed like a reliable witness and an actual assault victim. Yet no evidence of any incident having occurred ever cropped up.
Sergeant Chandler didn’t like cases that contradicted themselves. And logic had always escaped him in the Rebecca Moore case. So Sergeant Chandler closed the drawer of the master file, the dossier still in his hand. He walked back to his desk. Thinking about the case anew caused it to prey on his mind all the more. There had always been something about the case that had eluded him. Something he couldn’t see.
Chandler returned the file to his desk and dropped it back into the corner bin with the skull and crossbones. The Moore case just wouldn’t go away, he told himself, even after eight months. It was just like a bad dream. He prepared to go home. Yes indeed, he concluded, the Moore case was exactly like a bad dream.