Last Impressions (The Marnie Baranuik Files)

by A. J. Aalto

  “We remain,” they said, angrily, sadly, confusedly. “We remain. We remain.” And then, simply, “Don’t leave us.”

  My throat clamped up with regret and my eyes stung. They repeated as one, “Don’t leave us.” My vision blurred and I blinked away tears, forcing myself to focus. They felt betrayed, and alone, and forgotten here, beneath the water. I had to fight hard not to get hypnotized, drawn in by the depth of their melancholy.

  I saw that the heat sapped from the pond had made enough ice to form a bridge across the water, hopefully thick enough to bear my weight. Every dead gaze was firmly fixed upon my face, beseeching eyes, despondent looks, the faces of those long passed who should never have had to face the living again, and whose bones should never have been forgotten here.

  “I see you,” I said. “I will return, and I will speak for you. Go now, and be at peace.”

  I slid the planchette to GOODBYE and bid them farewell.

  As one body, and with one united sigh, they blew away with the wind.

  CHAPTER 30

  “OKAY, MOTHER NATURE, don’t fail me now,” I said, hopping to my feet and stuffing the scrying board away. I stopped the recording on my phone and tucked it away then shoved my gloves back on. “Before I can volunteer as poltergeist bait again, I need to get from here,” I pointed at the little spit of land that jutted into the pond to the land on the other side; now hidden by the dense falling snow, “to there, without going ass over antlers and into the drink, ya feel me?”

  Mother Nature was not quiet; she raged all around me with her blowing snow and gusting winds. She didn’t want to play nice. I was fairly certain my eyebrows were frozen.

  “And from there,” I told her, “I shall rescue the holy man and commence witching the blessed dogsnot out of that poltergeist. I think. I hope. The congress was nice enough to build me a bridge.” I stared up at the unfriendly skies. “Please, Dread Lady, if you make me light of foot, I won’t eat another donut hole as long as I live. I swear on the last Timbit on Earth.”

  I hoisted the backpack onto my shoulder and took the evidence box in my arms, checked my phone to make sure I hadn’t missed anything, and zipped it into the pocket of my parka for safekeeping. Cautiously, I set one foot on the ice bridge.

  It creaked and something deep underneath complained with a snap! “Now, be nice. I know the water is only a foot deep at the edge, but I don’t know what it’s going to look like halfway across, so, bear with me.” I lifted my left foot off the shore and set it on the ice. After two tiny snip-crinkles, the ice didn’t seem to shift much. “Okay, good. This is good. Juuuuuuust like this.” I shuffled a few steps ahead, shifting the evidence box so it was secure in my arms. A few more steps. The water on either side of the bridge looked fairly shallow. I held my breath, glancing back at the shore as I slid like a kid pretending to skate, not lifting my feet but skidding forward little by little. The shore got further away. The cold seeped through my ski mask; my ears ached. It seemed like the apparitions had drawn an enormous amount of heat away from this area in particular. The further across the pond I went, the colder the fog became, until I was slinking through near-frozen soup. The air puffing from the little nostril holes in my ski mask misted and the fabric of the mask was crusty and hard. For a moment the snow let up and I could see where I was going. She wasn’t fooling me; I knew that any second Mother Nature would blast me again. This storm was what my Grandpa Matts would have called a humdinger.

  “Please, Mother Nature, don’t—” Thunder-snow jolted me and I jumped a little, enough to rattle the ice beneath me. I felt it shifting and cracking, and froze in place. “Oh, bitch!” I whispered fiercely.

  Terror struck, I couldn’t move. The water still looked fairly shallow; ahead, it got too murky to judge its depth. When my hands stopped shaking and my knees felt less wobbly, I started to shuffle step again, talking to myself aloud as I went. “Dear Diary: I think I just peed my pants a little.” Shuffle, shuffle. “I’d like to say it was the first time since Kindergarten,” Shuffle, slip, shuffle. “Buuuut I think we both know that would be a lie. Love, Marnie.”

  Humor helped; self-deprecation, a classic Baranuik defense mechanism. I kept my eye on the other side of the pond, daydreaming that not only was Scarrow fine and dandy, but he had successfully exorcised Mama-Captain without me, said “Shoo!” to the cowardly spirit of John Briggs-Adsit, and Schenk was fine, and they had summoned up an ambulance and were sitting inside it getting warm and saving me a coffee and a warm blanket. They might even have a brownie, still warm from the oven. Not a donut hole, because I promised I wasn’t going to eat those anymore. Sweets and warmth and safety. Yes, that’s probably what was happening over there. Of course it was. Positive thinking. De Cabrera would be so proud, yes he would. I closed my eyes and could almost feel the near-future burn of too-hot coffee on my tongue. All I had to do was keep talking, keep shuffling, and get to them.

  “Dear Diary: I fell in this water yesterday.” Shuffle, slide. “Was it only yesterday? No, two days ago. When was it?” Slip, shuffle. “Fuck it, whenever. It was cold. And unpleasant. And even though I was only grabbed by a branch,” shuffle, whimper, “I know damn well there are six hundred skeletons under that mud, all heaved-up and unboxed. And the mud is really mushy, and I’m sure I’d sink up to my waist. And then what?” Shuffle. My breath hitched in as my throat constricted around my voice box and made my declaration a squeak. “Then I’d be waist-deep in mushy-gushy mud surrounded by icky, old, brown skeletons grabbing at me.” I paused to consider this. “Okay, probably they wouldn’t grab at me. But they’d poke me in the butt and stuff. Don’t you just hate being butt-poked by skeletons? Of course you do. Everyone does. It’s very un-cool. And then I'd die of hypothermia. Love, Marnie.”

  That conversation was a lot less helpful, and I tried to push the thought of old bones and a soggy death out of my mind. “Dear Diary: When I get home, I’m going to retire again, and spend all my time harassing Mark Batten for hot sex, wrestling him out of his pants, biting his shoulder, and digging my fingernails into his beautiful ass. Yes. Now, that is what I call a solid fucking plan. Pun intended. Love, Marnie.”

  It wasn’t going to happen, but it sure sounded good. I wondered, as I shuffled away from the deep middle of the pond toward the opposite shoreline if he had actually broken my vibrator, and if he was actually replacing it, and if he was actually buying the biggest one he could find, which would be, if my memory of the closest sex shop in Boulder served me correctly, the Cockasaurus Rex 3000. I wouldn’t mind owning one for laughs, but I sincerely doubted anyone outside the porn industry would get much use out of it for anything but home defense. The thing was the size of a Dachshund.

  “That’s right, Marnie. Keep thinking about giant dildos. That’s how we’ll survive this. Power of the pervert.” I closed in on the other side as the ice crackled, groaned, and moved underfoot; I held back the urge to hug my box and run the rest of the way just to get to safety. The shore was close enough that I could have thrown my backpack to it, but making a stupid mistake now would plunge me into deep waters; unlike the other side, this shoreline did not have a shallow rim. I couldn't see the mud at the bottom here. My footing uncertain, I took it a hesitant half-step at a time, feeling rushed by new doubts about Scarrow and Schenk handling things without me.

  With the edge just a few tantalizing feet away, I bit down hard on my tongue to resist jumping to it. “Dear Diary: This is my final entry, because I acted on impulse and wound up a Marnie-sicle. Love, splash!”

  And then I was back on solid ground, so relieved I could throw up. I didn't waste time looking back at the pond. I found some solid footing and began hiking up the incline to the top of the rise, slipping only once and catching my shin on a log. I paused a second or two at the top to catch my breath and swear therapeutically, and noticed three large ravens on a power line above me. One of them had a blue-black streak, or maybe that was just the way this stormy day’s weird, patchy light hit the fe
athers. Three more took flight from a nearby tree and settled beside the first three, and my scalp prickled. One gave a loud and pointed caw!

  I stared at them. They stared back. The skin between my shoulder blades crawled unpleasantly. Refusing to entertain the exorcist’s raven psychopomp nonsense, I carried on, spotting the break in the trees where Scarrow had led Harry and me up out of the valley from the Blue Ghost Tunnel. Had that really only been last night? It seemed like weeks ago. I definitely needed to un-fuck my sleep schedule once I got back to Ten Springs, starting with a very long nap.

  I said a quick prayer (“Lord and Lady, soothe my head / Quiet all the angry Dead.”) and made my way through the snow drifts to the tunnel as quickly as I could manage.

  By the time I got to the tunnel I had lost all feeling in my toes, my jeans were frozen stiff around my aching knees, my knuckles throbbed around the box of evidence, and the only part of me that was warm was my upper lip, safely trapped under my ski mask and humid from my panting. I saw no ambulance, no car, no Schenk, and worst of all, no sign of Father Scarrow anywhere. I set the box down outside the entrance. Someone had attached a lock to the gate since we’d been here last. The canal authorities? The factory? Was this factory property? The police? Had Schenk come out here to do it? Had Scarrow? Whoever it was, they didn’t bother blocking the hole in the brickwork. I peered inside while digging out my phone for light.

  “Father Scarrow, are you in here?” Drips. Movement. Shadows. “Is anybody here? Longshanks?” I bit my bottom lip, lowering my voice. “John? Mr. Briggs-Adsit?”

  I wondered, should I leave this box of stuff outside the tunnel or keep it with me? Schenk said not to let it out of my sight, but bringing John’s skull and Mama-Captain’s lacrimosa into the tunnel seemed like a supremely bad idea. Damn it.

  “Renfield?” I yelled into the hole. Nothing. I lifted the box into the hole before me, grimaced, ducked, and took it real slow so as not to slip on the frost-slicked mud inside. I turned on the flashlight app on my phone. Holding the phone delicately in my teeth, I went gloved hands first, eyes searching for any movement in the shadows.

  This time, I didn’t fall. There were no dogs to startle me with a sudden yap. Because the poltergeist drained them of heat until they literally froze to death. Like she did to Britney, who took her necklace, and Barnaby, who had her son’s skull. And now you have both. “Happy thoughts,” I muttered to myself.

  I picked up the box and my backpack, no longer hurrying, vibrating on the edge of pure terror. Because my brain hates me, House of Pain’s “Jump Around” was playing in the back of my mind. I blamed Harry. He’d probably been rapping like an undead dork in the big, beige bedroom at North House while I slept. That thought took the edge off my terror. I will not jump around. I will not get up, get up, and get down. “Hello?” I kept my voice light and sing-song, stubbornly maintaining the hope that he was just crouching in here doing something flakey or pervy. “Father Scarrow? Renfield? Hey, Mr. Rats. I’m calling you that thing you hate. Come out and spank me.”

  There was a spot ahead that constantly dripped water, and I had to scoot closer to the slick wall to avoid it. That’s when I noticed the MUCE hanging in thick runners from between the bricks. My upper lip curled in distaste at the snot-like encrustation. “Is that you, Mama? Or is that just John?”

  The dripping stopped and I glanced behind me at the spot. The water still flowed, but now it just hung there frozen in midair, icicles attached to nothing at top or bottom, growing longer as the new drips coalesced and froze. I squinted at them, awkwardly aiming my phone’s light app at them while balancing the evidence box in both arms.

  “Shivering shinbones! That’s not science-y. That’s wrong. Stop doing that, water, that’s the wrong thing to do.” I inched closer. “What kind of assholery is this? Obey gravity.”

  But they did not obey gravity. The frozen droplets hung there stubbornly with their crystalline beards, as if to prove a point: I see you. Now you see me, too.

  “Okay, okay. Hi. Very good. You’re fancy, you can freeze drips midair. I admit it: I do believe you can do a great many things to the physical realm. You’re clearly manipulating energy. But I have to say I’m disappointed with some of your choices. Pulling thermal energy from your surroundings, really? Thermal energy is pretty low quality. Second Law of Thermodynamics, high entropy, babe. Now, what you wanna do is draw your energy from a low entropy, high-quality source, like an electrical socket, or a human being. But then, as I say this, I realize you’ve got that last bit all figured out, haven’t you?" I chuckled nervously, ignoring the way my pulse was suddenly drumming in my ears, and carried on down the tunnel away from the bobbing icicles. “I’ll write a paper. I’ll put your name in it; how’s that? I was wrong about you; science is wrong about you; Father Scarrow is right. I will apologize to him the second I see him.”

  And I would, but he wouldn’t hear me. I was almost to the caved-in end of the tunnel when I spotted the black lump sticking out of the water.

  CHAPTER 31

  I EXHALED HARD, muttered, “Shit,” and hurried forward as quickly as the slippery mud between the railroad ties would allow. Frost slid and squelched underfoot, but I managed to stay upright.

  His head was underwater, face down, his heels sticking up, toes hooked onto the last railroad tie before the tunnel dipped and became waterlogged. The entire end of the tunnel stank of sulfur and charcoal and singed wood. I set the evidence box down carefully, flung off my backpack, and crept forward. No bubbles. No movement. The water was slick and glossy with ectoplasm, and though a sheet of MUCE obscured his head, I knew from the black skinny jeans on the ankles under the cassock that this was Father Scarrow. A King James Bible with sticky tabs along all three paper sides rested as though neatly placed on top of a railway tie, centered between two clusters of spindly, snow-white mushrooms. Scarrow’s simple cross was centered on its well-worn, black leather cover, and a folded piece of paper was stuck in it like a bookmark.

  “I’m sorry, Father Scarrow,” I whispered, tiptoeing closer, getting low near the boots. In the corner of my eye to my right, the darkness grew meatier, solidified. I told it, “Relax, whoever you are. I have to check him.”

  I removed my gloves and pinched the edge of his jeans where they were stuck in his boots. They clung wetly to his leg, but I could already tell by the rock-hard coldness of that leg that Scarrow was dead and frozen solid. Again reminded of a frozen turkey leg, I wiggled one of his boots until it came away and set it aside. Scarrow’s stiff body bobbed up and down in the water, dark hair fanning out from the back of his head.

  That mass to my right shifted and I heard a sigh. “No, no,” I told it angrily. “Shut your cry-hole. I gotta make sure. Just going to press on the posterior tibial artery by his ankle, here…” When that yielded no result, I shifted my two fingers to his foot to check for a pulse in the dorsalis pedis. It was hopeless. Father Scarrow’s heart had stopped long before I got to the Blue Ghost Tunnel. I sat back on my heels and let regret rinse down through me for a moment, wondering if I could have saved him if I’d come straight here when Schenk said he was missing, or if I’d stuck with him when he’d asked me to. He should never have come here alone. Was this my fault? Had I left him no choice?

  “No, that’s bullshit,” I said under my breath, angry with myself, angry at Scarrow, looking down at the distinct lack of rash on my DaySitter fingertips, where one touch of the holy man’s bare skin should have made it flare. “He had my number. He could have called. He should have called.” I scowled at the bobbing corpse. “I could have helped you. Why didn’t you call?”

  Because he thought you were a lunatic, my cruel brain reminded me. Because he was pissed that you sent away his test-tube ghosts.

  Just to the right of Scarrow’s abandoned boot was a crouching shadow. I pulled the evidence box to me, loosened the lid a bit, unzipped my backpack, and took out the scrying board to set on the ground.

  Without looking directly a
t the cowering shadow, I said bitterly, “Hello, John.”

  The ghost did not react to my presence. It seemed to be staring at Father Scarrow. Ghostly fingers clawed at a spectral mouth, padding at the filmy shape of his bottom lip. He had far more form than the congress had, clad in his civil war uniform, minus the hat. I wondered if he’d been wearing the uniform when he died, or if Mama-Captain had dressed him in it for his burial, wherever that had taken place.

  “John, do you see me?” I asked, putting the planchette on the scrying board. I poked it toward HELLO. “Captain John Briggs-Adsit, I’m calling you. Do you see me?”

  The ghost’s eyes cut in my direction at once. In a voice barely louder than a breath, he told me, “You do not belong.”

  “Well, no fucking offense, shitcart, but neither do you.”

  He paddled his lips some more, and began to giggle. It was the worst thing I’d heard since the squeak of Ruby Valli’s rubber boots on snow when she was coming to kill me; my shoulders scrunched up with revulsion.

  The specter stopped his lunatic gibbering with a jerk and looked up at me like he only just noticed me. “You do not belong here.”

  “Uh huh, you said that already,” I said. “Did you hurt Father Scarrow, John?”

  He started to moan, softly at first, building to an agonized howl from the belly. The tunnel amplified it and it echoed around us. I was impressed with the spirit’s ability to project so much sound. The groan dropped abruptly. “It’s dark,” he whispered, sending one spectral arm out into the air around him. It trailed fog through the air, stealing thermal energy as it went. “It’s too... it’s dark. I want to go. I want to go. I remain.” He started, and for the third time noticed me. “You do not belong here.”

  “Oh, John,” I said with a sigh. “You stayed with him, at the end, didn’t you? You knew Father Scarrow was in trouble.”