Cemetery of Angels 2014 Edition: The Ghost Stories of Noel Hynd # 2

by Noel Hynd

She turned, furiously. “I was nearly killed,” she said.

  “I also know your husband had an arrest record in New York, Maryland, and Virginia, Mrs. Moore,” Van Allen said. “You could have told us about that, too.”

  “An arrest what?”

  “Don’t play games with us, Rebecca,” Alice said. “It will only make things worse.”

  “You can’t get away with anything and I’m still waiting,” Van Allen repeated.

  Rebecca shook her head, grappling with her emotions. Her eyes went to the space on the wall where the message had appeared under the yellow paint.

  YOU ARE IN DANGER.

  Surrounded by the police, Rebecca did a second take on the cryptic message.

  Then the cold blast touched her, also. But it had a different effect. It settled her.

  “Tell us what you know, Rebecca,” Alice said Rebecca turned and looked at the two detectives. She now knew what had made the polygraph needle jump.

  “You won’t believe me,” Rebecca said.

  “I’ve been a cop in this city for two decades, Mrs. Moore,” Van Allen said. “I’ll believe anything.” He paused. “So try me.”

  “There’s a supernatural presence in this house,” Rebecca said. “And he took my children.”

  There was a leaden moment in the room when everything seemed to stand still. A long, long pause, as Van Allen fought off a sinking sensation. Then, “How’s that again?” Van Allen asked.

  “A ghost,” Rebecca said. “There’s a ghost who abducted my children.”

  Completely deadpan.

  “A ghost of what, Mrs. Van Allen?”

  “I think it’s the spirit of someone I knew. Maybe in another life. I don’t know. Somehow I know this man, and he has my children.”

  “Are you saying that your children are dead, Rebecca?” Double A asked.

  “All I know is that this house is haunted. There’s a spirit. It often appears in this room. The children saw it several times before they disappeared.”

  Van Allen speaking: “And you’ve seen it?”

  Rebecca answering: “Yes.”

  Involuntarily, in a corner of his mind that he didn’t like to visit, Van Allen saw the contents of his desktop being swept away. He saw it again and again and again. He wasn’t sure how long he stood there seeing it but he was eventually aware of Double A nudging him.

  “Ed?” she asked. “Ed? You okay?”

  “Yeah. Right,” he said, snapping back to time present. “And why do you think the ghost has the children, Mrs. Moore?” he asked.

  “It’s the only explanation,” she said. “And he told me.”

  “He ‘told‘ you.”

  “He told me. A few nights ago.”

  “Can I talk to him, too?” Van Allen asked.

  “Maybe. I suspect he’s here right now. Watching us.”

  “Maybe you could make him materialize,” Van Allen said. Rebecca waited for a moment, hoping the ghost would make itself known. It didn’t.

  “I can’t bring him forth,” Rebecca said. “It’s not something I can control.”

  But by now Van Allen was on a softer approach. “You’d better arrange it with him fast, Mrs. Moore, because without speaking to this ghost…”

  Out of Rebecca’s line of vision, Double A gave Van Allen a cryptic look.

  “Ronny. He spelled it out,” Rebecca said. “On the children’s blackboard. Follow me.” She led them to Patrick’s room. She walked them to a small blackboard and picked it up.

  “A few nights before the children disappeared, they told me that he had put his name on this board. But he did it with scrambled letters. Then they had rearranged them. They found the letters that spelled ‘Ronny,’ so that’s what they called him.”

  Van Allen looked at the alphabetical jumble and the circled letters linked together that had been unscrambled to spell the spirit’s name.

  Alice Aldrich and Van Allen exchanged another glance as she spoke. When Rebecca looked up from the blackboard, she caught the glance.

  Van Allen blew out a long dispirited breath. “So what you’re telling me, Mrs. Moore,” he said, “is that a ghost named Ronny came into this house and abducted your children. That’s all you’re going to tell me?”

  “I’m afraid it is,” she said.

  “And that’s what you call this ghost, huh?” Van Allen asked. “Ronny, huh? Like the former president who lived out her for all those years. Reagan.”

  “The kids call him Ronny. I think his name is Billy.”

  Van Allen felt a twinge at the name. “Why do you think that?”

  Rebecca shrugged. “I just do.”

  “Billy. Like your husband, huh?”

  Rebecca shook her head. “Bill hates the name Billy. He never wants to be called that, I never wanted to call him that. Bill and Billy are two separate things,” Rebecca was nodding as if she were on lithium.

  Van Allen looked at her and then looked at his partner.

  “See that you don’t leave the area, Mrs. Moore,” he said tersely. “And tell your husband we’ll be speaking to him tomorrow.”

  He cast her a withering look and signaled to Double A that it was time to leave. Rationally, he had had quite enough of this charade. He was ready to come back to this house with a steam shovel if it was necessary to uncover the bodies of Karen and Patrick Moore. Logic told him that. And the vision of his desktop being cleared away in front of him was pulling him in a different direction.

  The two detectives got into their car. Alice buckled into her seat belt. Van Allen didn’t.

  “What the hell was going on in there?” Alice asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You looked like you were having a stroke or something.”

  “I was… I don’t know,” Van Allen said. “Hell, I don’t know what to think. There’s some weird crap going on here, that’s all I know.”

  “Weird like what?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know, Alice. Nothing makes any sense any more. It’s not just here, it’s everything.”

  “Two children are missing, Ed.”

  “Yeah. I got that part. Thanks.”

  There was a long pause. Then Alice said. “You need some time off?’

  He thought about it.

  He glanced at his partner and then looked angrily at the house at 2136 Topango Gardens.

  “Maybe,” he said. “God knows I need something. Sometimes nothing makes sense anymore, all the things you believe, always took for fact. Truth isn’t truth anymore. The whole world is upside down. Know what I mean?”

  “You smoking weed again?”

  “No!” After several seconds, he added. “I just been doing a lot of thinking. Okay?”

  “How do you account for it?” Alice asked sullenly. “These people just moved here from the East. And already they’re homicidal maniacs.” She shook her head.

  “Yeah. Only in California,” he muttered. “Let’s get out of here.”

  He slid the key in the car’s ignition and felt the engine turn over.

  Chapter 43

  Edmund Van Allen angrily returned home at eleven o’clock, a rational real-world mood back upon him. How could he sustain anymore the illusion that Rebecca Moore had not done something to her own children?

  Why hadn’t he slapped a lie detector on both of the Moores in the first moments of the investigation? How could he have ignored for so long the basic fact that the children had never left that house? They were buried somewhere within. That left the Moores as the sole comprehensible culprits.

  And how, faced with his accusations, could Rebecca Moore even hope that he, as a rational policeman, could believe any of that supernatural mumbo-jumbo.

  And yet, and yet…

  He sat at the desk in his den and put on another Grateful Dead tape. Galveston, August 1989. He listened as Jerry Garcia’s bumblebee-style guitar riffs calmed him.

  “Ripple.”

  Yeah, Jerry, Van Allen mused, calming a little more. An
unseen hand making ripples in the water. Fine in a philosophical sense. Okay in a poetic sense. But Van Allen still rejected the supernatural in the case of Rebecca Moore.

  “Ripple.”

  Yeah. There was also crappy wine by the same name, if he recalled. A cheap drunk for people who hadn’t sunk to getting bombed on hair tonic.

  Van Allen opened up the Mont Blanc pen that lay across his desk set. The cherished heirloom from his father. The tactile security of the pen eased him.

  He went to his refrigerator and found a bottle of beer. He took a swig or two then put the beer on his desk. He left the den for a moment to get some notepaper. He came back and sat down. At his desk, he finished some notes on the Moore case. Then he closed the file.

  He reached for the beer. Jerry Garcia sang. The bottle was empty.

  He froze. Oh, yeah? What is that all about? He knew the bottle had been full when he had pulled it from the refrigerator. He had taken only a couple of swigs. But had he drained it?

  It didn’t make sense. He stared at the bottle. A creepy feeling overtook him. But his rational self battled back. He must have been so distracted from work that he didn’t remember finishing the brew.

  He set the bottle aside. He looked back to the file before him.

  He listened to the music. Arrows of neon and flashing marquees out on Main Street. He sat for several seconds with his hands folded across his chest, wondering if by any chance he had missed something in the Moore case. He decided he hadn’t.

  He closed the file. Yes, he told himself again, he had made his decision. The next day he would proceed with arrests.

  He showered and changed for bed. He took a final walk out to his desk and stopped short when he entered his den. Somehow, the beer bottle had taken leave of the desktop and lay shattered on the floor.

  Another creepy feeling was upon him, but again he rejected it. He examined the desktop. He breathed slightly easier. Somehow, a stack of books had slid to the left and must have knocked the bottle off the work area. Why it had landed so hard that it would break several feet from the desk was another question. But that was also a question that he didn’t feel like exploring at that hour. And as for the sound of the breakage, well, he had been in the shower, blasting himself with warm water.

  He cleaned up the glass and turned off the light in the room. He discarded the glass in the kitchen wastebasket and turned off the lights throughout his apartment, except for the bedroom.

  Midnight arrived and passed. But he was in bed before 1:00 A.M.

  The first part of the night came easily. It was restful and calm. But as the dark hours of the morning progressed, other forces began to claim the detective’s sleeping hours.

  Something was taking command of his head. Van Allen began to dream. The sequences of the reverie made no sense, but they were rife with phantasmagoric images: A parrot with a human head was talking to him.

  Deviation. Absurdity of life, a voice told him. Another image: Both his parents stood on the edge of a cliff, looking over a vast horizon. They joined hands and jumped.

  “Death, as it always comes to those we love,” the voice spoke again.

  Everything went black, and he turned over in bed.

  The unlinked visions continued.

  A brightness came upon his subconscious, then a darkness much the way an old television screen would come on and off. Then, when light was present, something resembling the grave of Billy Carlton was peaceful one minute, then swirling with dirt a moment later, as if blasted up from underneath the ground.

  While he slept, something grabbed him by the ankle!

  “I’m here, Van Allen. I’m in your apartment with you.”

  Van Allen shook in bed. In his dream there was a cold firm hand on his ankle. He shook again. His eyes flickered open into the darkness of his bedroom.

  Lord God in Heaven! The hand was still on his ankle.

  He bolted up from sleep and waved his hands at the foot of the bed. He screamed! The feeling suddenly lifted, as if the hand had released Van Allen’s leg.

  He turned the light on and looked through the room. He was alone. Or at least he couldn’t see anyone. He felt his heart pump, and he was aware of the wetness on his brow. Wetness? More than wetness! His face was flooded with a fearful sweat.

  Yet the room was empty. He settled back to try to sleep. He turned the light off. Thing was, his ankle hurt.

  Visions of the Moore case danced before his eyes. He held his eyes open in narrow slits in the darkness of his bedroom and waited to see if any images came to him.

  None did. An hour passed. His eyes closed, and he drifted again.

  Time warped. Many minutes later he felt himself turn suddenly in bed, as if startled. He tried to dream again, more peacefully this time. But now he was transported to some strange field in the moonlight, and there were white things all around him, things familiar that he couldn’t place. He was ill at ease with it because the white things were moving.

  “Come with me, Edmund. I will show you a new reality. A world of spirits!”

  And then he realized again that the hand was on his ankle.

  “Still here, Van Allen! You’re flying tonight whether you want to or not!!”

  He turned in his sleep and was trying to sit up again. But now there was a tremendous force upon his leg, as if a strong man — an unearthly strong man — now had two hands on Van Allen’s ankle, and gave it a tremendous pull.

  Van Allen heard his voice cry out again as in a nightmare! But the force was as powerful as any man he had ever physically challenged. Van Allen felt himself yanked hard. The lower part of his body lifted several feet into the air. The force in the darkness pulled him halfway off his bed.

  Then another sharp yank.

  He was pulled by the invisible hands onto the floor, where he hit hard. Then the force was gone from his leg, and he looked up. He was certain as certain as anything in his life that he saw before him, hovering in the room in an eerie brightness, a winged figure identical to the fallen image from San Angelo Cemetery.

  A human with wings, one arm extended high, either in peace or in foreboding. But the image was like an acid flashback because, as with such images before, it was gone in an instant.

  Van Allen barely had time to recover. He rolled across the room and found his automatic pistol and the light switch at the same time.

  He threw on the lights. As far as he could see, the room was empty as a violated tomb.

  It contained only one body. His, still living.

  He took several minutes to let his heart and nerves settle. His senses were on full alert the entire time, waiting for something unexpected from the next room.

  But the something didn’t come. Or at least it didn’t come yet. Gradually, Van Allen got to his feet. He held his pistol at his side as he walked to the door and looked into the next room.

  He put on the lights. Nothing there, either.

  He went to his den and froze again.

  His precious Mont Blanc pen was lying on the blotter in the center of his desk. It had been broken in half, as if by a pair of strong angry hands.

  Hands as strong as those that had pulled him from bed.

  Van Allen stared at it with anger and disbelief. But he barely dared to touch it. This was no ordinary night. This was no run of the-mill, sleeplessness from tension or anxiety or ten cups of coffee or ten rounds with José Cuervo.

  He sank into the chair across from his desk. He looked back to the desktop and waited for the items upon it to fly in every direction as they had once before.

  He sat in the chair. He saw the clock that said 3:45 A.M. He sensed the incredible darkness of the spirit that underpinned almost any night at this subversive hour. He understood why the ancients of so many cultures felt that the night belonged to Evil, and that in that darkness, spirits rose from decrepit old tombs and walked among the living.

  Scaring them. Mocking them.

  On his desk there commenced another small moment of t
error, designed especially for him.

  He breathed heavily as he helplessly watched it.

  A pencil. Never had a pencil conveyed so much menace.

  But in a single instant, it began to roll.

  Van Allen sat perfectly still and broke a final violent sweat. He watched the pencil proceed to the edge of the desk, hover slightly at the precipice, and then fall.

  It clattered on the floor.

  It rolled several inches and stopped. Van Allen kept his eyes trained upon it and expected it to rise in the air. Or perhaps propel itself abruptly at him.

  “Poltergeist phenomenon,” he thought to himself. “Ghosts! They exist!”

  Yeah, Van Allen thought, sure!

  “Who are you?” he asked aloud.

  A voice as soft as a rustle of a breeze on the leaves of trees on the most beautiful summer night of one’s life.

  “It’s me, Ed. It’s Billy!”

  “Sure, Billy,” Van Allen whispered aloud. “Why don’t you show yourself, then?”

  In the back of his mind, a prayer. “Holy Jesus, please save me!”

  Bad enough that he lived among the wackos of Southern California. Now he had to have restless spirits, too! The gun that weighed so heavily in his hand seemed as useless as a brick.

  He felt his forehead pour with perspiration. He felt one river of sweat moving slowly down his left temple. He made a gesture.

  “Pick up the pencil,” Van Allen said to whatever being could hear him.

  The pencil didn’t move.

  “Come on. I’m waiting,” Van Allen said.

  Still it didn’t move.

  “Can’t pick it up?” he asked, gaining some courage. “You can knock things over but you can’t pick them up?”

  The Ticonderoga lay on the floor. Words came to him from somewhere. An idle, terrified thought.

  “How about Billy Carlton’s angel?” Van Allen asked. “You knock that over, too?” In response there was a rapping somewhere in the apartment. And somewhere distant he thought he heard laughter.

  Then a kindly voice:

  “Edmund, I am Billy.”

  Van Allen’s heart hammered away within his chest!

  That banging again. The raps came hard and in apparent response to Van Allen’s question. More thoughts came to him from somewhere. Now it was as if some other force were guiding his brain, turning his thoughts sharply into reverse, sending the patterns of his conscious mind spiraling backward into his own youth.