by Brenda Novak
Walked out…and headed up the island chain for Marathon…and Kathy Kennedy?
Chapter 2
David Gray crumpled his beer can in his hand and eyed the stacked sarcophagi in front of him. Key Westerners were weird, he thought. They couldn’t just make mausoleums—they just stacked people on top of people in big blocks—stone or cement or whatever. Some of the graves were in the ground, some were in strange things—like the hump of a brick tomb—or whatever—down the row, and some were stacked one on top of the other like file cabinets.
It was dark, and he could barely make out the shapes of things, but this was a good enough place to sleep. Some jock-ass frat boys or bachelor party jerks had tried to stay in for the night, boasting about how cool they were, but the cops had come by and kicked them out. Davy laid low to the ground behind the big red brick tomb after he’d hopped the fence, of course, to get in himself. And now, the drunken buffoon party boys were gone; no one bothered him here.
He stayed low and drank his beer and thought about what a god-awful place this had turned out to be—for him, at least. Everybody knew everybody here—even the damned Eastern-Europeans who worked in the frigging shops, the Russians, Hungarians, Albanians, and what not. Pretty people, most of them—except for his bear-hairy ex-boss. They barely knew English—but they all knew that he’d been fired from three clubs for drugs and alcohol. “I mean what?” He asked a decaying plaster angel at his side. “It’s Key West—a pile of buzzed-out frat boys or giggling girls running around someone in a cheap wedding veil sloshed out of their minds! You serve them better if you’re a little feeling-fine yourself, you know?”
He wasn’t even sure it was his habit of imbibing a bit before work that had gotten him fired from the last restaurant. It was probably because big-hairy-beefy guy had been jealous. The problem, a hotter-than hell Polish girl, had been the boss’s quasi girlfriend. She hated his hairy ass and liked Davy. That’s what had done it.
He popped open another beer and noted that the six-pack of cheap beer he’d managed to buy on a major sale was going down—down, down. Only a few left. That was all right; he’d sleep better for the beer and in the morning, try to figure out what he was going to do with his life. In truth, he loved Key West and the quirkiness of it. The thought made him grin—he actually even loved the cemetery. There was a stone in the row of tombs or mausoleums or whatever that read, “I told you I was sick.” Yep, now, there was someone who told the truth!
He leaned back. He was by one of the oldest tombstones. He wondered if anyone was really beneath it—supposedly some dude who had died in the 1850s. But—cool story, and Key West had plenty of cool stories!—a hurricane had ripped up graves in the middle of the 1800s and bodies had come washing down Duval Street. That’s when they had put the cemetery here—highest point on the island, though, hell, you could have fooled him. It wasn’t that high.
He squashed his beer can and almost threw it across the grass and stones. But, he didn’t. He set it with the collection at his side and almost laughed aloud at himself. Boozing loser that he might be, he didn’t litter in a cemetery.
He suddenly heard laughter and a bunch of tittering. The jock-ass jerk boys were back. They hopped the fence. There were four of them and he could hear them talking to one another.
“Jamesy, you gotta go back for that snooty bitch at the bar—tell her who your daddy is! Bet she’ll be all over you, splayed out on a bed with a big ‘come on in’ sign set up on her thighs!” One of them said.
Davy winced. Yep, loser that he was, he didn’t like that kind of language. Made him feel squeamish.
“We need to get out of here,” another said. “The cops already came once and you guys are louder than a—“ He stopped speaking, breaking off to laugh. “Louder than a whole horde of screaming whores faking their orgasms!” He broke into drunken laughter again, enjoying his own joke tremendously.
“Shut up, ass,” the one who was most probably Jamesy snapped. “Come on now, I heard about this up in Savannah. Union soldier pissed off at the South moved all the headstones around at night. We gotta hurry. Before the cops come. Though, of course, don’t you go running, you sniveling dicks! My dad will get us all out of jail if we are caught.”
Davy thought about showing himself and telling them that what they were doing was wrong and disrespectful. Then he thought about the beers he had consumed—and wondered how big the guys were. He shrank down low against the gravestone he leaned against.
“Loser,” he whispered aloud to himself. Coward.
But, yeah, he didn’t feel like being beaten up on top of everything else.
He stayed still, barely breathing. Then he heard footsteps, the grass crunching near him. And then there was laughter. “Let’s move this dude. ‘Artie Hackensack.’ Who really has a name like that?” One of them demanded. “Let’s dump him over by the big sailor-shrine or whatever it is!”
They would be moving by Davy any minute.
Davy stood. He must have made noise because one of them shouted out something. “Hey there’s a twerp in the place. Let’s get the bugger—make him wish that he was down in the ground or sealed up in stones here!” The one he knew as ‘Jamesy’ yelled.
Davy jumped up and began to run. He thought he was headed toward Angela Street. There was a place there where a tomb was close to the wall. He might make a good leap out of the place.
“Cut him off, cut him off!” Someone else shouted. “The prick will call the cops!”
He started running. He passed the ‘file-cabinet’ style interments, using them to hide. He sprinted over a pile of in-ground burials. He hurtled around a long stretch of ‘wall’ interments.
The footsteps seemed to be coming from all around him.
Along with the taunts.
“Gonna prick you up, mouse!”
“You’re gonna hurt…before you’re dead!”
“Won’t have to drag you far…you’re already in a cemetery.”
“Sleeping with the ghosts—forever!”
He circled around a piece of funerary art—a praying angel. Even the statue seemed to think that he needed help.
Then, suddenly, when he thought that they were right behind him, he heard a scream.
It was a terrible, long drawn out scream of shock and terror—and then agony.
“Jamesy, Jamesy?” Someone else called.
And then Davy heard one of them say, “Shit! Shit! What the hell….”
That was broken off with another scream. It was so terrible that Davy felt goosebumps form all over him. He felt as if ice water was flushed through his veins.
He dropped to the ground by a brick-oven type tomb. Shaking.
And then he saw…it.
At first, he was convinced it was a person. Perhaps a cemetery-vigilante. But, a person….
He laid low as it came forward.
It was of average height…a nun!
A nun! Except that….
The nun was dead. The flesh was rotted away so badly from the skeletal face that it was really impossible to tell the sex of the thing in the long black robes. Scabs covered what flesh was left. The eye sockets were enormous. The mouth seemed to be frozen in a massive and open O.
Somehow, Davy kept from screaming.
And somehow….
The thing walked by him.
It just kept going. And going. And disappeared behind a stretch of monuments.
Davy stayed frozen for what seemed like hours. Then he moved at last. At first, he was shaking so badly, he couldn’t even walk. Then his strides became long, and then he was running.
The tomb that would allow him to leap over the wall was near….
He tripped and went flying. He rolled, wincing from the pain of his fall. He tried to right himself and then he froze again.
A corpse was before him. A corpse with wide-open eyes and a ripped open neck. Blood streamed over the ground beneath him, crimson against the moon-lit white of a tombstone slab.
***
Danni looked curiously around the Victorian parlor of Colby’s historic home; she loved the architecture, the bay window, the crown molding—they all seemed to give the house tremendous character. She’d always loved the old—probably because her mom had died when she’d been so young and she’d spent so many years traveling with her father—collecting.
Even though she hadn’t actually known what they collecting at the time!
She hadn’t known until her father died, when a woman had come into the shop shrieking about a marble bust that had killed her husband and Quinn had come in, larger than life—and more demanding and imposing—and she had learned the hard way that she hadn’t been left the shop, she’d been left a life’s vocation.
Evil did exist. And it could invade the strangest things.
Like a painting…the painting that had led them to Geneva and the “year without a summer” when Mary Shelley had written her classic and darkness had prevailed. Like a musical instrument—magic? Or in the mind?
Waldorf was unhappy; he certainly seemed to believe that evil existed in things—and that something evil was in his house.
She held the still shivering cat and waited for Quinn to finish with his phone call. When he rang off, she turned to him.
“Well?”
Quinn shrugged and said, “Colby is first thankful that the cat is okay—and he suggested that we try the attic; the police swear that no one touched the place, but really, who knows what happened? Kathy screamed and ran out into the road and the car hit her. There was all kinds of activity going on. Anyway, he’s at a loss, but he did suggest that we try the attic. He left it in the attic—Kathy said that it was down in the hallway.”
“Ah! The attic,” Danni murmured. “Of course. Lead the way.” She hesitated. “You’ve got your gun, right?”
“Always,” he assured her. His voice was even and low. She actually smiled.
She loved him; really loved him. It was something she freely admitted now. They lived together, even if she changed the subject any time he mentioned marriage. The world was so strange—and their role in it even stranger. Sometimes he was called away on simple cases without her, and sometimes, she needed certain space to grapple with something herself.
Yet what would her life be without him? And would she have even survived some of the things that had happened if he hadn’t been with her, six-feet-four-inches of brawn and a mind set on saving the world—and her, of course. And he could be fun and his eyes could flash with such amusement, and sometimes, she realized, too, that he was impossibly masculine and that even thinking about him could be something exceptionally arousing.
The cat meowed loudly—protesting—and jolted her back to their situation.
She suddenly found herself wishing that Wolf was with them. The wolf-dog hybrid knew way before any human could if someone was there.
If something was wrong.
Not that she didn’t have faith in Quinn; he had been military, he had been a cop—and she did trust him with her life. In fact, he sometimes wanted to protect her when she needed to be involved, which didn’t make things easy. She still didn’t really understand their roles in the greater scheme of life and the world, but she did know that her father had helped others for years, that the shop had taken in and defused many weird things—and that the shop had been left to her. She loved to believe that she and Quinn—with the help of Wolf and their friends--did do good things for others around them.
And she had certainly had learned that evil did exist.
And, hell, by their very nature, attics could be very scary.
“Let’s head on up,” she said, trying to sound matter-of-fact.
But, she already felt unease. As if there was something there—a malevolent presence.
“As soon as I can get Waldorf down without having my arms ripped to shreds.” She set the cat down on the sofa, promising that she’d be back soon. The damned cat is probably smarter than the two of us!
Quinn quickly moved up the stairs to the second floor landing. He searched the ceiling there, looking for a pull-down stairway or ladder to the attic; Danni smiled and pointed to the end of the hallway. “Stairway is right there,” she told him, grinning.
“Too easy,” he said. But he grimaced sheepishly.
“This is an old Victorian,” Danni said. “Servants probably had their quarters up there at one time—not unlike our place on Royal Street.”
“You’re probably right,” he agreed, heading down the hall.
Danni searched the walls for a light switch. Quinn found a string to pull that connected to the antique fixture that hung from the high ceiling.
The stairway led to a closed door—a locked door, but a locked door with the key right in it. Quinn opened the door.
“Stay behind me,” he told her.
She smiled. He couldn’t help falling into protective mode; she knew that.
The attic was almost completely dark—almost. The corners were dark for certain, but a large paned glass window at what would be the front of the house allowed the moonlight to shine in.
Shadows cast long silhouettes due to that pearly yellow light and seemed to douse the space with a strange and eerie atmosphere.
“I can’t find a light switch,” Danni murmured.
“Or a pull string,” Quinn said. “You’d think we’d be bright enough by now to never travel without a flashlight.”
“At least you’re bright enough to never travel without a gun,” Danni told him. She realized she was whispering. The attic seemed to call for her to speak so.
“There!” Quinn said.
He’d found a pull switch. A single bare bulb in the center of the attic cast a bizarre, wavering glow over the attic—and all the toys and junk and things within it.
There were boxes here and there, stacked high. There were hooks of all kinds that held clothing, old clothing, costumes, perhaps. There were….
Creepy masks, set on bodiless pre-fab wig-heads.
There were tombstones, miniature coffins.
“Quinn!” she gasped suddenly.
Behind a number of boxes and next to a life-sized werewolf prop was something tall, shrouded in black.
It was a…man!
No, a woman…
No…but there was a figure standing there and it seemed to be watching them in the surreal light.
It felt like it was watching them!
“That’s it,” Quinn said softly, and they both moved forward.
It was the zombie-nun. It had indeed been moved to the attic.
It was clad in the black traditional robes of a nun and it was certainly one of the creepiest fabricated creations Danni had ever seen. The body beneath the robes was skeletal—but bits and pieces of torn and ravished flesh seemed to remain upon the bones. The mouth was open, as if in a horrific scream. The eyes—sockets in the skull—still seemed to have the ability to stare out—to watch, to see, to follow a person as they moved around the thing.
“Pretty bad, huh?” Quinn asked.
“Would have scared the hell out of me,” Danni agreed.
As they spoke, one of the hands suddenly jerked up. Danni screamed—startled--and backed away.
“It’s all right, it’s all right,” Quinn said. “It’s a robot, really, run by batteries, I believe. Remember, an animatronic—set to move for filming.”
“So maybe we can find the battery case and turn the damned thing off!” Danni said.
Quinn smiled and told her, “Let’s get it up and out of here. I can inspect it better downstairs.”
“Okay. Be careful coming down,” Danni warned. She knew what had frightened Kathy Kennedy so badly; the thing seemed to reek of evil. She reminded herself that it was meant to look horrible and evil—it had come from a horror movie.
But, she knew, too, that it was true—things could be imbued with evil by those who had been evil, who had practiced alchemy or black magic or…. at the very least, had the power of a hatred and a thirst for
power or revenge that was so strong, that the evil surrounding that person’s life could remain, could be instilled in things….
“It’s just an animatronic, Danni,” Quinn said softly.
“Yes.”
He made it down the attic stairs and then to the parlor with the thing—heavy enough, Danni was sure—beneath his arms. In the parlor, Danni jumped a mile when the cat meowed again—a meow that seemed like the most horrible and haunted scream ever.
Waldorf disappeared beneath the sofa.
“Waldorf, it’s okay, we’re here,” Danni said.
The cat would have none of it.
Quinn turned on every light, pulled off the black cassock, and let the thing—the bone structure—stand in the bright light of every bulb in the parlor.
There was a box at the back, set into the spine. Quinn unsealed the rubbery substance used to create the thing and pulled out the box, dumping the batteries from it.
“There, Waldorf—it can’t hurt you anymore,” Quinn said.
Danni studied the thing. The workmanship was excellent. She shook her head. “I can see where this might have scared anyone,” she said. “So, what do we do? Pack it up, take it back to New Orleans—try to sell it for Colby? Or burn it?”
Quinn stood there studying it as well. His phone rang and he answered it briefly with just his name. As he listened, Danni picked up one of the hands. It looked as if blood really dripped from the skeletal fingers with their sharply pointed nails.
Quinn suddenly strode over to the entertainment center and found the remote—still on the phone, frowning fiercely. The television popped to life—on a news channel.
Danni stood in front of the screen. A reporter was standing in front of cemetery gates; police were scrambling around and a crowd had gathered. In the background, she could see that there were a number of television news vans around and that there were a number of reporters covering whatever had happened there in the night.
“Police have little information to give us as of yet,” the reporter, a pretty dark-haired woman was saying, “but we do know this—shocking murders have taken place, entirely out of place in this beautiful community where crime is usually down to brawls initiated by inebriated visitors—or pickpockets preying upon the unwary. Three are confirmed dead; their names have yet to be released. From all accounts, we believe they had broken into the cemetery at night. There was one survivor; police, of course, have taken him into custody. One witness, a neighbor whose house sits right across from the cemetery, has agreed to speak with us exclusively.”