The Moonlight Monsters Detective Agency Volume One

by Maggie Harper

  For a second Tina was speechless.

  ‘What?’ she said, ‘are you sure?’

  ‘No doubt. I knocked on near every house up here. No one’s heard of anyone by that name or anything like it.’

  Tina stared out at the darkening city sky. Despite herself she couldn’t help but smile. That absolute bastard.

  ‘Ok,’ she said, ‘get the cash back here and we’ll put it in lockup.’

  She closed the phone and put it back in her purse. So just what did this mean exactly? Obviously the money wasn’t D.A.’s or he would have asked for it back before he left.

  ‘So the cash must have been Parker’s all along,’ she muttered, ‘that bastard...’

  In her pocket she still had Sam Parker’s photo from earlier. She took it out and looked closely at the roguish blonde vampire with the chancer’s smile on his pale lips.

  ‘Sam Parker,’ she whispered, ‘you and me aren’t through yet – not by a long shot. You’ve got a lot to answer for when I finally catch up with you. And I will catch up with you.’

  She took a sip of warm coffee and looked out at the orange glow that hung over Moonlight City like a winter blanket. Somewhere he was out there. And like it or not, the bastard was probably smiling.

  # # #

  High Spirits

  It was a crisp December evening and a light smattering of snow was carried on the breeze as Tina Peterson – special investigator, for the Moonlight City Supernatural Detective Agency (also known as the Moonlight Monsters’ Detective Agency, by those in the know) – ducked into Al’s Diner from the busy street outside. Inside, the small café was close to empty, no more than two or three of the red plastic booths were occupied, and Tina quickly spotted her guy.

  ‘Hey Chuck,’ she waved, ‘sorry I’m late, the snow has the traffic backed up all the way across town.’

  ‘Not good enough Peterson,’ Chuck Valchek joked and then waved his hand as though the humor in his voice wasn’t already obvious. ‘Nah, I’m just pulling your leg Tine,’ he smiled, ‘I’m just glad you could make it down here on such short notice.’

  ‘Yeah me too,’ Tina said, signaling for a cup of coffee. She slid into the seat opposite Chuck’s. ‘Been extra busy this last week. Something about the cold really brings out the crazy in people.’

  ‘Don’t I know it,’ Chuck nodded, ‘we’re all swamped too – though nobody’s complaining about the extra overtime with Christmas just around the corner…’

  Chuck Valchek was also a detective, albeit a human one, unlike Tina who was part demon (an eighth to be precise). Chuck worked homicide for the Moonlight City Police Department and was Tina’s number one connection in human law enforcement. They’d crossed paths two years ago when they both landed in on a magical drugs operation from different angles. The racket was headed up by a coven of warlocks and, in the shoot-out that followed, Chuck Valchek had seen far too much strangeness to be convinced that something wholly paranormal wasn’t taking place. Well sure, there were methods for making people forget (and in fact some of those methods even happened to be already packed and pre-prepared inside the makeshift lab they’d just busted) but Tina decided what the hell? The guy seemed to have a good head on his shoulders and the connection would certainly come in useful.

  Since then, they’d thrown each other a few cases now and then whenever they felt like a lead was more in keeping with the expertise of the other side. In fact just over a week ago Tina had passed on a Mafia guy who’d been caught making an expensive drug deal with a renegade demon prince. Tina had psychic abilities, so she extracted information on the perp’s entire gang before handing him over. Needless to say, the guy had crapped himself when the cops started spewing names and numbers that had been pulled right out of his own mind and soon enough they even had him agreeing to testify against his bosses.

  ‘I have to say,’ Chuck grinned, ‘that was quite the case you gave us Tina. Man, you should have seen the look on that bozo’s face when we told him how much we knew.’

  Tina shrugged. ‘All in a day’s work,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah well if you ever think of giving up the gig on the weird side of life then there’ll always be a place for you with the MCPD. A cop with your abilities could go far.’

  ‘Ha,’ Tina laughed, ‘that’d make it too easy chuck.’

  Chuck Valchek shrugged and nodded to himself. Tina realized he’d only been half-joking. He cleared his throat.

  ‘Anyway Tine,’ he said, ‘the reason I asked you to meet me today is this: I don’t know if I ever told you, but my sister’s a special needs assistant…’

  ‘You didn’t,’ Tina said.

  ‘Yeah well anyway, Sandy’s been working with this little girl these past few weeks – an autistic kid by the name of Anna Hernandez – and she says she’s witnessed things like she’s never seen before since taking that job. Crazy things…’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like dolls flying around the room, doors slamming on their own.’ Chuck stared at Tina over his coffee cup, his face imploring her not to laugh. ‘Hell, she even said the grand piano started playing all by itself – Chopsticks, no less…’

  ‘Hmm,’ Tina said, ‘the girl could be a psychic savant. It’s not uncommon for humans born with extrasensory abilities to be hindered in some other part of life – only so much consciousness to go around, if you like.’

  ‘Well shit,’ Chuck sighed, ‘your guess is a whole lot better than mine, right? Anyway, Sandy’s all set to bail on the job. She’s a pretty down to earth kind of woman, never experienced nothing like this is in her whole life. But at the same time she doesn’t want to just up and abandon the kid. The parents are both working to get by, you see, so they’re pretty ill-equipped to cope – and that’s before you factor in the supernatural element. Sandy’s at her wits’ end, she doesn’t know what to do.’

  Tina sipped her coffee. ‘Don’t worry Chuck,’ she said, ‘I’ll give it a look.’

  Chuck Valchek visibly relaxed. ‘Really?’ he sighed, ‘Ah jeez Tina you’re a God send.’

  ‘I dunno about that part,’ Tina grinned, thinking of her distant but nonetheless demonstrably-infernal family roots. ‘Anyway, you got an address for me?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Valchek nodded pulling a crumpled scrap of paper out of his pocket, ‘number thirty-five Godot Road.’

  ‘Godot Road? That out by the airport?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Chuck nodded, ‘nice, quiet little residential area.’

  ‘Cool,’ Tina said, ‘I’ll swing by this evening, see what I can dig up.’

  ‘Hey thanks a million Tina, I owe you one – especially after that last case…’

  Tina shrugged it off. ‘Forget about it,’ she said, ‘you know how it is, I give you something when I have it, and you do the same for me. Hell, this creepy little girl angle could turn out to be the case of the year.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Tina laughed, wiggling her fingers with theatrical spookiness, ‘maybe it’s a possession…’

  ‘Sheesh,’ Chuck shivered, ‘sometimes I really don’t envy you.’

  Tina drained her cup of coffee. ‘All in a day’s work, Chuck,’ she smiled, ‘all in a day’s work.’

  She stood up and began putting on her long trench-coat. ‘Hey I’ve been meaning to ask you,’ she began, ‘you ever hear of a guy named Sam Parker? Smooth talking little British twerp, blonde hair…’

  ‘Sam Parker,’ Chuck repeated to himself as he mulled over the name, ‘no, can’t say that I have. Sorry.’

  ‘Yeah, well you just give me a call if you do,’ Tina said. ‘Nice to see you Chuck.’

  ‘You too Tine.’ Chuck nodded. ‘And don’t worry; I’ve got the bill…’

  ‘I know,’ Tina smiled and stepped back out onto the street.

  Sam Parker was a vampire huckster from London who’d moved to Moonlight City to set himself up as a paranormal private eye. Since he hadn’t been willing to go by the proper channels and actually acquire t
he licenses he needed to work, Tina and her partner Boris (who happened to be a six-foot-seven Russian werebear) were called in. After catching up with him mid-case, the detectives agreed to help him track down a demon magician who Parker claimed had just defrauded a family-man of a quarter of a million dollars. Well they succeeded in intercepting the suspect alright and even got back the money. Problem was, Parker had disappeared – and his defrauded family-man turned out to have never existed in the first place.

  So naturally Tina was very keen to track down Sam Parker. The way she figured it, the money had probably been his all along and – since they still had the whole haul in impound – it couldn’t be too long before Parker came calling, looking to get it back. That said, Tina had been periodically using her psychic tracking abilities to try to get a scope on him all around the city and had routinely come up with nothing each time. Since she had a range of several miles, that meant there was a good chance Parker had left the city. Either that or he’d found some way to block her out.

  As she crunched across the snowy sidewalk, carefully dodging flustered Christmas shoppers, Tina dialed in Boris’s number on her cell. He picked up on the third beep.

  ‘Ya, what is it?’ he asked, ‘I’m still sorting through these files from last year that Ernie dug up.’

  ‘Boris,’ Tina said, ‘I think I’ve got a lead. A psychic savant little girl, by the sounds of it, but it could be a poltergeist – or maybe even a possession…’

  ‘Aaahhhh,’ Boris sighed, ‘wonderful! Do you know how bored I’ve been? All day – seven damned hours since Ernie dumped these files on me. I thought I was going to go insane.’

  ‘I hear you,’ Tina said, ‘appreciate you taking one for the team on that. Anyway, the house is out by the airport on Godot Road. Number thirty-five. I’m going to catch a cab, can you meet me out there?’

  ‘Ya!’ Boris called, ‘I’m on my way.’

  ‘Ok, one more thing: before you go, get Ernie to run the address through the computers, see if he turns anything up.’

  ‘Got ya.’

  ‘Cool,’ Tina said and closed her cellphone. She stepped out onto the road to wave down a taxi.

  The sky was darkening as she entered Godot Road. The street was a small, quaint cul-de-sac that felt like it was further out of the city than it actually was (the only thing puncturing the illusion being the airplanes that occasionally launched nearby and thundered up into the clouds only a few hundred feet above the roofs of the houses). The cab pulled up by number thirty-five and Tina got out.

  Hmmm, she thought, looks like a relatively new building – that makes a haunting less likely.

  The house was a nice, typically-middleclass home, with a small front-yard and redbrick walls. Tina walked up the path and rang the bell. A few moments later the door opened.

  ‘Yes?’

  Mrs. Hernandez – if that’s who it was – was pretty and relatively young to be a mother, though there were bags under her eyes from lack of sleep and her dark hair was frazzled.

  ‘Mrs. Hernandez?’ Tina said, ‘my name is Tina Peterson, I’m with the SDA. I was referred here by Detective Chuck Valchek – Sandy’s brother?’

  At the mention of her daughter’s care-worker Mrs. Hernandez’s face lit up. ‘Sandy? Did she say when she’ll be coming back? We’re really lost without her.’

  ‘Well that’s kind of what I’m here to help you with,’ Tina nodded, ‘Chuck tells me you’ve had some strange happenings of late. May I come in?’

  Inside, the house was warm and homely – there was definitely love there – but, as Tina stepped into the front-room, she sensed something else too. Something colder.

  ‘Juan and Anna are in the kitchen doing some drawing,’ Mrs. Hernandez said. ‘Thing’s are quiet at the moment, thank God.’

  ‘After you,’ Tina replied, ‘please.’

  She followed Mrs. Hernandez across the room, past a big piano under the staircase and through another door out to the kitchen.

  Sitting at the table, hunched over a bundle of paper and crayons were Mr. Hernandez and young Anna. The father looked as tired as his wife as he glanced up in surprise at the unexpected visitor. The girl continued to sketch undisturbed.

  Honey,’ Mrs. Hernandez said, ‘this is Tina Peterson, she’s a friend of Sandy’s brother. She says she might be able to help us with our problem…’

  Tina flashed her badge and replaced it in her pocket, just long enough for him to see that it was legit, but not long enough for him to descry just what department it was that it garnered that legitimacy from.

  Tina Peterson,’ she said, ‘SDA. Nice to meet you Mr. Hernandez.’

  They shook hands. ‘Call me Juan,’ the young father said.

  ‘Is this your daughter?’ Tina asked

  ‘Yes,’ Juan replied, ‘but please don’t be offended if she doesn’t respond – that’s just the nature of her disorder.’

  ‘Hi honey,’ Tina spoke to the little girl, ‘how are you this evening?’

  Anna Hernandez looked back at her. Her face was expressionless and she offered no answer in reply. For a moment Tina reached out to the little girl’s mind and a cataclysm of shapes and colors flashed instantly across her vision, like she was floating through a universe of mathematical anomalies. There were no words.

  Tina stepped back. Reading someone with autism was always a little trippy, but she hadn’t sensed anything that could be said to have been “not of this world” exactly.

  She turned back to Mr. and Mrs. Hernandez as the little girl got back to her sketching.

  ‘Ok,’ Tina said, ‘so why don’t you tell me exactly when these disturbances first began.’

  The young couple exchanged glances.

  Oh,’ Juan said, ‘I’d say almost as soon as we moved in, right Karen?

  His wife nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that’s right. We’ve only been here for a few months, you see. We thought it was a dream come true at first.’

  ‘Yeah it all seemed so perfect,’ Juan said, ‘but then the banging started…’

  ‘Always at night,’ Karen continued, ‘as soon as we’d go to bed, the doors downstairs would start banging open and shut – even the kitchen cupboards and the fridge. It was inexplicable.’

  Juan folded his arms and sighed. Tina nodded for them to go on.

  ‘Well once I’d made sure it wasn’t an intruder, I was stumped,’ Juan said. ‘For a while I thought maybe it might be a stray cat or dog, but it didn’t fit. There’s just no way a cat or a dog would be able to open and shut all those handles, over and over…’

  ‘And that was when things started moving,’ Karen said, ‘I mean, they’d been moving around for a while sure – stuff going missing, or turning up in weird places – but now they started to move right in front of our eyes…’

  ‘You probably think we’re crazy,’ Juan said.

  Tina smiled. ‘Absolutely not,’ she said, ‘in fact, I think it’s a marvel that you’re not crazy after enduring so much stress these past few months.’

  ‘Yes well, we’ve only seen it moving things a handful of times,’ Juan continued, ‘it happened much more frequently when it was just Sandy and Anna in the house. We think maybe it actually wanted to scare her away.’

  Tina chewed the information over. It was sounding more and more likely that she had a poltergeist on her hands here.

  ‘Ok,’ she said, standing up from her seat, ‘you guys have seen and heard some things these last couple of months that have opened you up to a wealth of new possibilities about the world. I would like you to carry that open-mindedness a little further for the next few hours while I’m with you. In my work I often administer a process of inference – in fact, it’s what you would probably call a psychic reading – and I would like, with your permission, to take a reading of your daughter…’

  Juan and Karen looked at each other uneasily for a moment, but did not say anything.

  ‘The reason I ask, you see,’ Tina said, ‘is because it’s not un
common in these situations for the source of the disturbances to be a child or an adolescent in the household and when that is the case, believe it or not, it actually occurs most often when those children are suffering from autism or some other form of mental impairment.’

  Juan sighed. ‘We didn’t want to say anything,’ he said, ‘but we did consider that.’

  Karen stepped forward seriously. ‘But it couldn’t be,’ she said, ‘Anna’s just as clueless as we are in all of this. I can tell.’

  Tina walked down to the end of the table where Anna continued to sketch, apparently oblivious to the serious mood that had settled over the room.

  ‘Do you mind?’ Tina asked.

  Juan looked at Karen. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t anyway. What about you, honey?’

  ‘Please, go ahead.’

  Tina sat down beside the little girl. Anna continued to draw.

  Slowly, Tina beamed the words: “hello honey,” into Anna’s mind.

  She felt the little girl respond emotionally, though the gesture was free from words and essentially formless. Tina branched out and entered the strange and abstract landscape of the girl’s mind. Fractals and diagrams of all shapes and sizes flew it at her from every angle. She ebbed against huge clouds of colored emotions, riding on a wave of synesthesia. It was like being inside a children’s educational cartoon.

  As Tina traversed the ordered chaos of Anna’s mind, she suddenly felt herself coming closer to what she was looking for. And then, in a flash, a face appeared to her, filling her whole vision – a giggling child, with blonde curly locks and a pallor that was as pale as the dead.

  “Anna,” Tina asked, “can you tell me who this is? Do you know who this little girl is?”

  She felt the confines of the girl’s autistic mind contract as she strained to form a response. A cloud of emotion filled her – curiosity, wonder, and mild trepidation. It was how Anna felt about the girl.

  “Anna, can you show me more pictures of this girl?”

  Nothing. Just the same giggling face. Slowly Tina drifted out of Anna’s mind.