Black Horse and Other Strange Stories

by Wyckoff, Jason A.

  As clear as the origin of the inscription was to Samantha, it was just as clear that the message was meant for her. She had no doubt of it. She embraced the loving certainty of impossible coincidence deep into the core of her being. She knew the feeling would fade and she didn’t care. She knew trouble followed trouble and she didn’t care. She closed the book and hugged it tight to her breast.

  Hair and Nails

  ‘It’s a damn shame, Jess.’ Bob repeated the mantra like he was trying to remember what to pick up at the grocery store on the way home from work. ‘A damn shame. A damn shame.’

  ‘Thank you, Bob.’ It was perfectly natural for Jesse to call his friend’s father by first name—the Mathenys were old family friends, and Jesse and Doug had grown up together. Jesse appreciated Bob’s effort; he knew it must be difficult to offer condolences to a family of undertakers. Especially when the deceased was bitterly despised in the last years of his life, and everyone was relieved the old bastard had finally kicked.

  ‘I guess I’ll see you boys back inside.’ Bob stretched out his arms and touched each of the boys on a shoulder.

  ‘Okay, Pop.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Bob clearly wanted to say something more, something helpful; the best he could muster was the old platitude, ‘Remember him the way he was,’—in this instance, referring not to when the deceased was alive, but further back, before his degeneration into dementia and spitefulness. Bob turned and went back inside the funeral home.

  Jesse and Doug drifted a few steps more towards the parking lot, reaching in synchronised motion into their black jacket pockets to retrieve cigarettes. Left hands cupped against the mild, warm breeze and right thumbs snapped down to strike the flints of lighters. Quick puffs, then deep inhalations, then sighs of profound relief followed.

  Doug knew better than to try to say anything meaningful. ‘Pretty shitty wake, man.’

  Jesse grinned—it was just a showing inside, not a wake. ‘We’ll put one of you Irish on the slab if that’ll liven things up.’

  ‘Ooo, “liven things up”—you am funny.’

  ‘I are a genius.’

  They smoked for awhile in silence, taking in the minutiae of the living world as amplified in the presence of death: the dreadful unimportance of every errand run by every driver on the main road, the taunting greenness of spring pocked by blisters of blooming white and pink, a quick, drifting laugh from an unknown source at an unknown joke, gone. Thinking on the grimness of what they intended to do to the old man helped the young men comport themselves with the proper attitude back inside the funeral home.

  The deceased was Martin Edelson, Jesse’s great-grandfather, an immigrant and the founder of the family business in America. Martin spoke little of family affairs back in the old country, but had made reference to his father as also ‘dealing with the dead’. Jesse was expected by both his family and himself to be the fourth generation to enter the family business. His family had not pressured him, and he had not resisted—it was simply understood that this was to be his calling, that he would follow in the flow of one of a very few businesses that still passed from one generation to the next. Jesse had begun working summers at the funeral home during high school. When Jesse came on full time, his great-grandfather appeared satisfied with the future of the business and opted for retirement. Of course, as he retained partial ownership of the business, ‘retirement’ meant occasional consulting and even presiding over a few services for the Edelsons’ older clients. That had continued for a few years until Jesse’s father and grandfather had felt compelled to hide Martin away from their clientele. Martin had gradually but undeniably become nastier in attitude, gaunt in appearance and, most tragically of all, diminished in mental capacity. He became forgetful and was clearly despairing that his memory was becoming less clear. Whether this caused him to become cruel and spiteful, or whether the conditions causing the memory loss also created the change in personality, was often debated by Jesse’s father and grandfather. It was also during this time that Martin began hinting about his treasure.

  Either because of the chasm of their years, or simply because he had less shared history with Martin than his father and grandfather, Jesse was less affected by the degradation of the old man, and was, ironically, able to suffer his presence more easily. Because of this, Jesse was assailed more frequently with the strange, taunting fragments about the treasure that everyone else in the family dismissed as the fantasies of dementia. But, though there was nothing in the specifics of the telling that could be considered convincing, there was a perspicacious earnestness pervasive in Martin’s comments that led Jesse to believe some truth was trying to claw out from behind the incipient madness. Jesse thought that if there were a treasure, then Martin’s dismay at his weakening memory may have prompted him to reveal its existence, just as the meanness corroding his personality caused him to hold back its location—the result being exactly as witnessed: a series of indistinct teases dropped amongst knowing or suspicious looks.

  Jesse would ‘indulge’ his great-grandfather, asking after the treasure’s location. He would do this when he thought Martin’s discretion at its weakest, either from fatigue or from over-excitement.

  The best answer he ever got was, ‘Out there in Union!’ (Union Cemetery held the majority of the Edelson’s clients.) ‘Dig ’em all up if you want to find it!’

  The next day, Martin attempted, unconvincingly, to explain that the treasure he spoke of was metaphorical and referred to the family business as a whole.

  During the winter, Martin shrivelled, communicating only in curses and dry spits; he died with a rasping howl one week after Easter.

  Doug Matheny shared Jesse’s world as the two grew up together. Though he knew he would never be part of the family business, it was nonetheless natural to him that he should develop a parallel interest in death. As the Edelsons dealt primarily with the corporeal aspects of death, Doug’s interests ran to the complementary concerns of the more esoteric and spiritual. A lazy Methodist upbringing kept him from any inclination towards divinity school; instead, Doug studied English and History at a small, urban Liberal Arts college, during which time he immersed himself in the Occult. Doug was able to pursue his studies as only one who has an unshakable best friend and who has two families vested in his interest could—with no equivocation of identity, and no worry of what his contemporaries might think of him or his interests. Doug felt no restraint beyond the limits of his daring, and those limits he would test enthusiastically and often. Doug tired quickly of the ‘dabblers’ amongst the other students, the drug-experimenters and female-empowerment advocates, the neo-pagan environmentalists and tantric sex-excusers. He pursued the terrible mysteries of magick wherever the search would take him. ‘Depravity’ and ‘blasphemy’ were labels of indulgence or illusions of temperance to him, each false; knowledge was all that mattered, knowledge and the power it brought. Doug learned to manipulate all manner of magickal energies; he could assert his will over certain commonalities of physics and push possibilities of experience beyond what most could imagine as ‘real’. Thus, he was uniquely qualified to help his best friend find a dead man’s lost treasure.

  Martin had, on occasion, referred to the treasure as ‘the family legacy’. Jesse took it to mean that Martin brought the treasure with him from the old country. Jesse’s inquiries under the guise of interest into the life of the recently departed evoked no more than rudimentary facts, times and places from his father. Jesse eagerly volunteered to help ‘go through’ Martin’s belongings. He pored over every stilted pose in every photograph but found no clue. He fitted every loose key with its companion lock but unearthed no secrets. He compromised the integrity of every piece of Martin’s furniture, seeking false bottoms and hidden compartments. A neat stack of ledgers spanning Martin’s career held promise initially, but Jesse failed to divine the meaning of the passionless, codified shorthand he found inside. The entries ended abruptly; several blank books remaine
d.

  Doug arrived back in town the evening before the viewing. After Jesse told Doug all about his great-grandfather’s ravings and his failure to determine the location of the treasure, Doug chided him.

  ‘You should have told me right away instead of wasting your time. We can still get information from the old man directly. And dead men can’t lie.’

  Jesse knew well of Doug’s studies in magick, and had never doubted the veracity of every claim he’d made as to its efficacy. Though acclimated to the idea of the occult, Jesse nevertheless felt the dizzying thrill of the novice to be included in such a discussion.

  ‘Timing is tight. The viewing is tomorrow. The service is the next day, with cremation immediately following.’

  ‘Cremation? I’m surprised.’

  ‘We helped to exhume a body for DNA testing last year. It’d been in the ground thirty years. But the preservation was nearly perfect. The family felt compelled to have another funeral service when he was reburied. But it wasn’t fascinating or anything like that—you want life to last forever, not death. I don’t know . . . somehow, something to do with the nature of the business—we were all appalled.’

  ‘Well, your livelihood depends on turnover.’

  They chuckled.

  As he retrieved the keys from his jacket, Jesse felt compelled to look back across the empty parking lot, across the indistinct pools of pallid, ochre light, through to the sporadic sentinel trees holding the night back behind them.

  Doug laughed at him, ‘Well, you’re not exactly breaking in, you know. And I’m the one who “left his wallet” in here. Though I’m not sure how I would’ve left it in the cooler.’

  Jesse smiled at his nervousness as he pushed open the door.

  ‘Alarm,’ he offered blandly, then moved to the keypad on the adjacent wall and disabled the system.

  Doug shut the door. The street sounds disappeared. Through unspoken mutual agreement, the friends stood unmoving in silence for a minute as their eyes adjusted to the dim light and their ears picked up the comforting hum of refrigeration.

  Doug exhaled. ‘Shall we?’

  They went downstairs and stopped for Jesse to unlock another door. He pushed it open, stepped through, and turned on the lights. Epileptic fluorescents flickered and became still, illuminating the clean, metal sinks, the cabinets with their frosted glass sliding doors coquettishly pulled shut over coloured plastic jugs, the green tile floor slanting to the drains.

  ‘I’ll get him.’ Ball-bearings rattled as Jesse pulled a sliding curtain along its track. Jesse ducked out of sight, re-emerging a second later. One wheel squeaked meekly as he pulled the gurney across the floor into the work area. A blue cloth covered over a shallow, rectangular shape.

  Doug slipped a utility knife out of one jacket pocket and produced a plastic sandwich bag from the other.

  ‘Will anyone see the body again before cremation?’

  Jesse straightened the gurney parallel to the walls and stopped.

  ‘Yeah. As you can see, he’s already in the box, but there’s a final prep.’

  ‘So I can’t just take the fingers.’

  ‘I think . . . minimal damage would be better.’

  ‘Let’s get a look at him, then.’

  Jesse pulled the cloth away with a matador’s flourish, revealing a topless box of thick, corrugated cardboard. Inside was Martin Edelson, the waxy flesh of his face drawn back over jutting cheekbones, pulling down the hint of a sneer. His arms lay down at his sides, the hands hidden between the folds of his brown suit pants and the sides of the box.

  Doug frowned disapprovingly. ‘There really wasn’t anything you could do with him, huh?’

  ‘You think his face is something? Look at this.’

  Jesse reached in and grabbed at the sleeve of the dead man’s jacket. He put his other hand in the crook of the elbow and pulled the forearm up perpendicular to the body. Martin’s hand was frozen in a talon-like clutch.

  ‘We couldn’t get his damn hands to stay open. So they just stuffed them down in there. What do you need?’

  ‘Well, as you know, Dr Edelson, the hair and the fingernails continue to grow after death.’ They both smiled at this common fallacy; in fact, it was the skin that receded, exposing more of the hair and nails as it went. Doug continued, ‘It is in these materials that the dead reveal their secrets and expose themselves to . . . manipulation. Here: Hold these fingers steady as you can. I’m just going to cut away the base of the nail on a few of his fingers. If I can get under the cuticle, it should pass any indiscriminate inspection. Careful, the blade is sharp.’

  Jesse adjusted his grip to keep away from Doug’s cutting motion as the latter attempted to ease the utility blade through the base of nail with a minute sawing motion.

  He asked, ‘Isn’t it odd that the spell will work even though it’s based on a superstition we know to be false?’

  Doug placed the sliver of nail and connecting flesh in the baggie and set it on the dead man’s lapel before directing his attention to another finger.

  ‘Eh. It’s magick. Crazy stuff happens. A few more of these and then we’ll get the hair.’

  Union Cemetery was situated on a large plot of land bordered on the south and west by four-lane roads, to the east by a narrow, muddy river, and to the north by a nursery/gardening store. It was surrounded by a four-feet tall wrought iron fence, easily scalable. The cemetery was modern (the oldest gravestone was inscribed with a date of 1909) and well kept; the occasional elm, oak, or birch jutted up from between rows of varying rectangles and obelisks, trimmed hedges lined the asphalt paths. Jesse and Doug found a welcoming spot towards the northeast corner, hidden from the road by a mausoleum and the lolling curve of the earth. Jesse sat on ‘Celia LaTour 1901-1958’ while Doug situated himself under the branches of a tree. Doug cleared away a small area in front of him so that the bare earth showed. He produced several plastic, capped containers from a sports bag and set them beside him. From the first vial he poured a thick, golden liquid on the bald dirt, shaping an archaic symbol.

  ‘Honey?’ asked Jesse.

  ‘Yes, dear?’

  Jesse winced. ‘Shut up.’

  Doug emptied the other vials into an earthen bowl: a lumpy, congealed mass, ashes, a crystalline powder, another thick liquid, and finally the hair and nails from the baggie. He mashed the ingredients together with a pestle.

  ‘I’m not sure exactly what to expect. The location of the treasure may simply “come upon me”—or, hell, it may “come upon you”—but I think it’s more likely we’ll have a visual effect.’

  Jesse leaned forward. ‘You’ve never done this before?’

  ‘I’ve talked to the dead, sure. But that’s not what we’re shooting for here, ’cause we don’t know if your great-gramps is going to want to be communicative. Instead, we’re compelling an aspect of his soul to submit to our wishes. Here: I’m going to light this mess on fire. Look into the fire and concentrate on who we are commanding, and what we want of him.’

  Jesse tried to prepare himself, tried to think of some conversation he had had with his ancestor; he could only picture the man in his cardboard casket, the dull cover of his skull receding, the flesh peeling back as though fleeing from its owner, exposing the blanched bone and yellowed teeth beneath.

  Doug straightened his back and breathed in deeply, raising his chin then lowering his head as he exhaled.

  ‘Now . . . don’t laugh, because there is chanting involved.’

  Doug bowed forward and back slowly, chanting low moaning words that Jesse took to be something like Latin, but interspersed with long vowel ululations of indeterminate origin. The air around them grew thick. Jesse’s ears popped suddenly. He noticed the glow from the headlights of passing cars stuttered like frames of stop-motion. Whatever Latin there was in Doug’s chant was gone, dark bass swells of sound alone remained. Doug became keenly aware for the first time that he was hanging off the earth, not stationed upon it. Doug’s right hand fli
cked up with a jerk; a small ball of fire convulsed between his thumb and forefinger. Doug threw the ball into the bowl—

  The whole mess exploded into a mushroom of black smoke with an ignominious poof.

  Jesse rolled away and blew and spit the smoke from his mouth. He blinked his tearing eyes rapidly, too late in clearing them to avoid Celia LaTour’s headstone. He ran his hands over his face, coughing. He heard Doug and realised he had been closer to the source than Jesse. Doug hacked violently, holding himself prone on his hands and knees as he strove to clear his lungs. Through wheezes and coughs, a harsh laugh began to emerge.

  Doug fell to his side.

  ‘Well . . .’ he began, then tried again, ‘well . . . that went (cough cough) perfectly!’

  Jesse wiped tears from aching eyes and peered through the dissipating smoke into the streetlight and moon-lit gloom beyond. Shadows spilled from the silhouettes of gravestones, shifting disinterestedly as headlight run-off polluted the cemetery. No other motion caught his eye. There was no alien glow present for him to see. He searched inwardly, as well; nowhere in his thoughts did he feel any instinct or find any sudden knowledge as to the whereabouts of his ancestor’s hidden treasure. He sighed disconsolately.

  ‘Nothing, huh?’ Doug came up beside of Jesse, and supported himself with a hand on his friend’s shoulder when a fresh round of coughing commenced.

  ‘No,’ Jesse confirmed.

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘I felt it, though. I mean, I felt something—’

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ Doug went back to where he’d performed the spell and picked the earthen bowl, wiping the charred ash onto the ground. ‘The energies were here—I had a good flow going. Sorcerers have always couched their wisdom amongst tricks and obfuscations; sometimes the spells are sabotaged or the physical ingredients are a goof, like a spontaneous smokebomb, right? I haven’t been caught like that for awhile.’