Cold Dead Past

by John Curtis

  Gary turned to the counter and caught the matronly waitress’ attention with a smile. She came over to the booth and pulled a pad from her apron with a flourish. A pencil magically appeared from behind her ear, where it was buried in bleached-blonde curls. Jay could see some gray roots and figured that the restaurant wasn’t the only thing here that could be said to have a nineteen-fifties theme.

  "Can you get my friend here a cup of your dee-licious coffee, Frieda?"

  Frieda just giggled as she scribbled the order on her pad and loped back behind the counter.

  "I saw the news," said Jay.

  "That was a real mess."

  "Have you guys got any leads at all?"

  Gary took a drink of his coffee and stared into the cup as if to scry an answer.

  "I wish we did."

  Frieda returned and set Jay’s coffee down in front of him.

  "Do you handsome men need anything else?"

  Jay shook his head and she ripped the check off the pad and set it on the table. He reached for it, but was just beaten out with a quick grab by Gary.

  "I’ve still got the faster hands. I’m getting this one. You can treat me when I get to your neck of the woods. How’s Meg?"

  "Uh…fine."

  Gary Laughed and took another drink from his cup.

  "She told me you were coming over for dinner. She was real happy about that."

  Jay pulled his coat off and let it slide down behind him.

  "It’s a little warm in here," he said, as he grabbed the sugar dispenser and poured a long stream into his coffee.

  "It might be none of my business, but she was real hurt when you broke up. I wouldn’t want her to be that way again."

  Jay stirred his coffee and took a sip. He didn’t feel like getting sidetracked into this discussion. Not when the events of the previous night had seemed to make the past irrelevant.

  "You know, about the other night, what exactly happened?"

  Gary shifted uncomfortably in his seat and looked from side to side.

  Leaning across the table he said, "It was an old drunk. Some garbage men found him stuffed in one of the cans in the alley next to the Longbow."

  "I heard that much on the news."

  Gary leaned back and said, "Well, that’s all I can say. Except that he didn’t die from natural causes."

  "And what about Jack Hauser? Tommy said something about him being messed up."

  Gary leaned back, pulled a pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket. He thought for a moment as he lit up and took a drag on the filter tip. He exhaled a plume of smoke before he said, "There’s no relationship between the two. No one had seen him around for a few days. When the feed man brought by his order, he went on ahead to put it in the barn and found the body lying at the bottom of the ladder to the hayloft. We figure that he fell and broke his damn neck and some raccoons or something got to him. What are you so curious for?"

  Jay took another drink of his coffee. Was it really as simple as Gary had laid out? But he remembered how small towns can be. Simple country folk led more complicated lives than city folk ever imagined.

  "I just thought that it was kind of strange that a town this size would have two people die and have their bodies muilated."

  Gary picked up the restaurant checks and slid out of the booth.

  Standing over Jay as he pulled on his coat, he said, "There’s nothing strange about it. You writers have got a little too much imagination."

  Gary turned and walked up to the counter to pay the bill. Jay lazily ran his fingertip around the rim of his cup, deep in thought. Maybe Gary was right, but he had this itch that he couldn’t quite scratch. He wanted some fresh air, anyway, and taking a little drive would be good for him.

  CHAPTER 13

  Jay almost missed the entrance to the driveway into the Hauser farm. Usually, when they were kids, he would take the shortcut and walk across the fields. He sat in his car, looking down the long ribbon of gravel, toward the house and outbuildings. They looked like they were about to be squashed under the low, gray clouds boiling across the valley from the east. He shifted into drive and rolled on through the gate.

  He pulled to a stop in the lot in front of the barn. Jack’s ratty old pickup still sat where he’d parked it the day he had died. Jay stepped out of the car into silence broken only by the occasional call of a crow off in the nearby woodlot. The hog pens and corral were empty. Someone had thought enough, at least, to cart off the livestock. He pulled up his collar to ward off the chill and walked over to the barn.

  When they had played here as kids, it was always painted a bright red with white trim. Now the paint was peeling and chipped and in some places it was worn down to the weathered wood. Jack’s dad would never have let it get into this kind of shape.

  He was surprised to find that no one had bothered to put a padlock on the barn door. That already told him much about what he’d find inside. It was obvious that someone had already been out and picked the place clean of anything valuable. Probably Jack’s sister, Janice. She’d never been one for the farming life and more than likely would be putting the place up for sale as soon as the probate court gave the okay. Meanwhile, it never hurt to have a lot of un-inventoried goods that you could sneak past the tax man to make an extra couple of bucks.

  He took a look back at the spot behind the house where Mrs. Hauser used to hang out her washing. It was filled now with old car parts. Jay peered through one of the windows. The room was bare. It was his guess that either Janice had been around with a moving van or Jack had stripped the house bare in an effort to pay the mortgage. No farmer who was doing well would have allowed the place to get in such a state of disrepair.

  There was a small door cut into one of the large barn doors and when Jay grabbed the latch in his hand and pulled it open, there was a loud creak that caused the hairs on the back of his neck to stand up. He peered inside. It was murky, dim, the only light admitted through the open door and the split and warped seams in the walls. He threw the door open wide and stepped in.

  It looked just as Jay remembered it. As his eyes adjusted, he glanced down at the rough plank floor. It was covered with muddy footprints. They were recent, as the ground outside had been frozen solid right up until a couple of days before.

  He was startled by the sudden rustle of feathers as a couple of doves, disturbed by his intrusion, cooed and flew up into the rafters from one of the stalls. He could feel his heart skip a beat. It was too dark to get a good look at the hayloft from the front of the barn. His eyes shifted warily from side to side as he walked toward it. The only sounds were the whistling of the wind outside and the creaking of the old wooden floor.

  At the bottom of the ladder to the loft, he pulled a flashlight from his pocket and switched it on. He played the beam along the base of the ladder and discovered he was standing in a large, irregularly-shaped, ochre-colored patch of dried blood. Jay quickly jumped up onto the bottom rung with both feet. He hung onto the side with his free hand as he slipped the flashlight back into his coat pocket.

  The ladder shook as Jay climbed. He could hear ominous cracking noises with each step up. At the top, he wrapped an arm around a rung to brace himself and brought the flashlight back out of his pocket. Here, at just about eye level with the floor of the loft, all he could see at first were some old bales of hay.

  They smelled of mold and were scattered across the dark space that ran to the back of the barn. If there were any place in the barn where he would find evidence of the raccoons that Gary had been talking about, it would be up here. They liked to be up high. Jay heaved himself up onto the floor of the loft.

  He rose to his feet and noticed some pellets of scat. They skittered across the floor like pebbles when he kicked at them. When he stepped on one, it crumbled into dust. If there had been a varmint living up here, it hadn’t been around for a long time.

  He was about to head back down the ladder when the flashlight beam caught a tuft of hair. As Jay approached
it, he could see a trail of more leading toward a pile of loose straw near the front of the loft. Not just tufts, but what looked like patches of hair that had been ripped out, skin and all. It was as if someone had been peeling an orange and carelessly dropped the peels as they walked. He couldn’t tell what kind of animal the fur was from until he reached the end of the trail.

  There, in a nest of straw, was the body of a cat, looking like it had been ripped apart and skinned. The cat’s guts, all shrunken and dessicated, were piled next to the body. It looked for anything like someone had laid them out in an exploded view, like those sets of instructions for a piece of furniture from Ikea.

  When he looked up, Jay came face to face with something even more gruesome. Arranged on a bale of hay were the heads of a dozen animals in various degrees of decomposition. It was like some gorey trophy collection.

  "Raccoons, my ass," he said, under his breath, as he cringed and began backing away.

  "Raccoons don’t set up trophy displays," he thought to himself, "or lay their kills out neatly to show off to the neighbors." No animal did. He wondered whether Gary had been up to see this and how he would explain it away if questioned.

  CHAPTER 14

  The next day, Jay woke up in his hotel room refreshed. He could get used to a full night’s sleep without waking up covered in sweat, a silent scream on his lips.

  Meg had left a message at the front desk that she would be busy all day showing houses. He called Gary at the sheriff’s office from the house phone and was told that he had run into Albany for some police business.

  Now, with time to kill, Jay decided to take a walk downtown. He always did his best thinking on long walks. Besides, it would be nice to see what kinds of changes had taken place since he had been away.

  His first stop was the alley where they had found Charlie Harper’s body. He stood, hands in pockets, looking it over. He wasn’t quite sure what he had expected to see. The only evidence that something had happened was a wadded up length of yellow police tape stuffed into a garbage can.

  The visit only confirmed to him that this was indeed the location he had seen in his dream. Not very enlightening, knowing the where and not the why. At least he knew he wasn’t delusional. He couldn’t recall ever having been down this alley before, so there was no rational reason for it to have appeared to him in such detail.

  From the murder scene, Jay took a leisurely walk down Main Street. Thomas Wolfe said that you can’t go home again. For years, Jay had taken that literally, hating the thought of returning to the town that had taken from him the two most important people of his youth.

  Long sessions with his psychoanalyst had taught him all about his tendency to avoid his problems. He freely admitted to himself that the funeral was just an excuse to run away and hide from something he feared a lot more right now than his past, that damn keyboard and blank screen. The only good thing about the whole excursion was his chance to be with Meg again.

  As Jay wandered down the freshly-shoveled sidewalk, past buildings that had been sandblasted and scrubbed clean of all their character. What an appropriate punishment for Haddonfield’s sins against him.

  The Rexall pharmacy, where Meg had given him that first kiss behind the greeting card rack, the kiss Frank taunted him about, was now a gourmet food store and coffee bar. The hardware store, an Ali Baba’s cave of wonders to him when he was eight-years-old, was now just another link in a homogeneous chain, devoid of any spirit of community.

  The whole place had been turned into some blank, sterile copy of any one of a thousand other small towns that specialized in liberating vacationers from their hard-earned dollars. There was no longer anything here to fear, or so it seemed.

  The whole burg had become a monument to city folks’ over-developed need to believe that if they bought a rusty sawblade painted with poorly done scenes of country life here, it was a far superior thing to purchasing the same item from a junk shop just ten blocks from their apartment.

  By the time he found himself in front of the Evil Eye bookstore, he had almost convinced himself that he was in an amusement park caricature. Then, in the display window, beneath a half-open eye outlined in gold leaf, was a handmade poster with one of the eight by ten glossy black and white photographs of him that the publisher had sent out in the promotional packet for "Raven’s End". Next to it in red marker was his name and the words "Hometown Author" in large capital letters.

  His vanity got the better of him and he decided to go in. A little bell above the door chimed to announce his entrance. The pimply-faced teen reading a copy of Jay’s book and sitting at the counter the left of the entrance barely grunted out a "hello".

  Jay remembered the place as a Murphy’s five and dime store. Now the one word he could find to describe it was "gloomy". It looked more like a warehouse than a bookstore. The walls had been stripped down to the bare brick and every square inch of the space was crammed from top to bottom with books.

  Down the center, running from the door to the back of the store were tables covered with books. Each table had a sign marked "closeout" or "sale". Jay thought that he would have a little fun and stepped up to the counter.

  "Hi. I was wondering. Is that book you guys have in the window any good?"

  The clerk looked up with nary a sign of recognition and said, "Well, I kinda like it. My sister’s in college and she said it was dime novel crap. I just think it’s a good read. Not a lot of big words. We get a lot of people asking about it."

  All that filtered into Jay’s thoughts was the word "Bitch!".

  "Did you want a copy?" the clerk asked. "I’ll have to get you one out of the window display. Those are all we have left."

  After the opinion of this punk’s sister, that was some consolation, he thought to himself. They were almost sold out. There were what, six copies in the window? How many copies would they have started with? Maybe fifty? One hundred?

  Jay began running the numbers on how much the royalty payment was on one hundred copies when the clerk added, "My boss bought a dozen copies of that when it came out a few months ago. It’s what he calls a slow mover. So, do you want a copy?"

  Deflated, he answered, "No. I think that I can get it cheaper online."

  He was about to turn around and slink out of the store when a thought occurred to him.

  "Do you have any books on dreams?"

  "You’ll find them in aisle two."

  Jay looked around, instantly asea. Nothing in the place was marked. There were three close-set rows of floor-to-ceiling shelves to either side of the discount tables in addition to the ones running along the walls.

  "Aisle two?"

  The spotty-faced clerk gave an annoyed look and slid down off of his perch behind the counter.

  "C’mon. I’ll show you."

  As Jay followed along behind, he noticed a couple of other customers browsing around in the shadowy depths of the space between the first two shelving units they passed. The books seemed to range from tattered used paperbacks to brand new editions with no attempt to segregate them.

  The contents of each aisle were carefully delineated on typed sheets hung in frames on the end of each bank of shelves. Jay glanced at them as he passed and saw that the stock ran the gamut; from ancient history to science fiction and fantasy to ancient pagan teachings.

  The clerk turned down an aisle packed with titles like "Your Dreams And What They Mean" and "Dream Your Way To Wealth". The closeness of the shelves gave the claustrophobic feeling of being deep in a crevasse.

  He turned to his guide and said, "No. This isn’t quite the kind of thing I had in mind. Do you have anything that isn’t geared to the crystals and pyramids crowd?"

  His companion shrugged and waved for him to follow as he continued to the end of the aisle. His voice cracked as he yelled, "Hey, Abe! I got somebody here that is looking for a serious education."

  The boy turned back to Jay and said, "Just a minute and my boss will be right out."

  From b
ehind a curtain that hid an opening in the back wall of the store came the screech of wood on concrete. A cardboard flap taped next to it had the word "Office" scrawled almost illegibly on it in black marker.

  A gruff, deep voice barked, "Just a minute."

  The curtain flew back with a flourish. Into the archway stepped a man who looked to be in his early sixties, bald except for a close-cropped fringe. His barrel-shaped body filled the doorway and a long, slim, hawk-like nose was set between wide, brown, bloodshot eyes.

  Jay could feel himself being sized up as the man asked, "How may I help you, sir?"

  Then, recognition filled the man’s eyes. He quickly shuffled over and clasped Jay’s hand in one of his hammy paws.

  "Bless me. Jay Putnam. I’m Abe Greene and I own this place. How are you boy? What do you need?"

  Jay gave a half-step back, unable to pull himself loose, and said, "Great. I’m looking for some books on dreams, but none of the trade stuff. I want some serious literature on the occult."

  Abe’s arms fell back down to his sides. A dreamy look came across his face, as if he were thinking about a land far away or dosed with Valium. Then a smile parted his lips, revealing yellowed teeth. He turned and began walking away. When he realized that he was alone, Abe turned back and gave a come hither wiggle of his finger.

  Jay and the clerk followed him down one of the dimly-lit canyons of books to a point about three-quarters of the way back to the front of the shop. Abe pulled a library stool up to one of the shelving units and began looking through some of the books stored up high.

  "Are you working on a new book?" he asked.

  Jay shook his head. "No. This is for something personal."

  Abe began pulling down books and handing them to him. Two of them were quite large and covered in thick layers of dust. By the time Abe came back down off of the stool, Jay’s arms sagged and the weight of his load made them ache. He almost lost his balance trying to juggle the books and stifle a sneeze caused by all the dust floating around his head.