by Orrin Grey
“Yeah,” I said. “Time-Life books.”
“Those are books! What, do I need to pump out fucking War and Peace before I can call myself a writer?”
“Did you tell her you write Time-Life books?”
Jerry frowned. “No.”
I spread my hands as if to say, Well, there you go.
“That’s beside the point, Felix.”
“So, there is a point to my being out here in the sticks at four in the morning?”
“There is if you’d shut up and listen.”
I gestured for him to go on.
Jerry cleared his throat and smoothed down a tie he wasn’t wearing. “I think Julie might be in trouble. I talked to her earlier today — or yesterday, I guess it was — and she mentioned she was going to stay late with the guys she’d hired to work on the house.”
I looked over at the van parked in the driveway.
“Julie and I have been working closely together since I picked up the place. We talk on the phone a dozen times a day; we’ve exchanged hundreds of e-mails and texts; and, after a while, things started to get a little flirty.” Jerry put on a face that managed to look both sly and embarrassed. “Then they started to get a little … dirty.”
“Skip to the emergency, Jerry.”
“So, anyway, we talked about getting together later tonight, maybe grab a bite to eat or something, once the guys were done. When I didn’t hear from her by eight o’clock, I tried calling her, but didn’t get an answer. I tried again at eight-thirty, nine, nine-thirty. At ten o’clock ….”
“You drove out here,” I finished.
“Actually, I fell asleep,” Jerry said, a little guiltily. “I woke up around two-thirty and tried calling her again. I still didn’t get an answer and that’s when I started to get worried.”
“Maybe she didn’t have her phone with her.”
Jerry shook his head. “Julie’s one of these people who has her cell phone permanently grafted to her hand.”
“Maybe she’s ignoring your calls.”
Jerry said, “I considered that,” but I could tell from his dismissive tone that he didn’t consider this to be a realistic possibility. “I cruised by her place and her car wasn’t there. This” — Jerry nodded at the house — “was the only other place I could think of, so I drove out here and found her car. I was about to check inside, but then I saw the work van parked here, too.”
“So?”
“So?” Jerry frowned. “This is one of my houses, Felix. As in, haunted. As in, potentially, paranormally dangerous.”
“That you’re planning to fix up and sell to someone,” I pointed out.
“I inform all potential buyers about what they’re getting into,” Jerry said defensively. “It’s the law. Full disclosure of any and all supernatural activity on the premises. Besides, most of the people that go in for this stuff don’t buy the properties to live in them. They collect them the way other people collect stamps or baseball cards.”
“So, what’s the deal with this place?”
“It’s a relatively new house, built around twenty years ago, back when the urban sprawl in Toronto was really … well, sprawling. People were looking for places like this: close enough to the city to commute but far enough away from the noise and crime and general craziness.”
I twirled my hand in a let’s-move-this-along gesture.
“So, anyway, the couple who built this place had only been living here a couple of weeks when the husband suddenly got up one night and killed his wife and son. I haven’t been able to dig up much on the case — this happened pre-Internet — but I do know the same thing happened to the next couple who moved in. Except, in that incident, it was the wife who killed her husband. They didn’t have any kids, so the case wasn’t quite as sensational as the first one, but, at their respective trials, both of the accused claimed to have been ‘possessed’.”
“I’m guessing they were both convicted.”
“Of course,” Jerry said. “You know how hard it is to prove possession by a supernatural entity in a court of law?”
“Only because you keep telling me about it.”
Jerry nodded. “It’s very hard. Nearly impossible. I can count the number of acquittals on one hand. Hell, until thirty or so years ago, the charge was still being called ‘demonic possession’, which brought in all kinds of religious implications that don’t exactly mesh well with the judicial process. It’s hard enough to defend a person in a case that involves paranormal phenomena without throwing God and the Devil into the mix.”
“This interior decorator, what did you say her name was?”
“Julie Spiro.”
“Why does that sound familiar?”
“She used to have a home improvement show on The Learning Channel.”
I remembered now. Not so much the show as the woman who hosted it: a tall brunette with freckled cheeks who looked as good in a crisp suit and heels as she did in a paint-stained t-shirt and cargoes.
“Is the show still on?”
“No,” Jerry said. “It was cancelled. Julie still fixes up houses; she just doesn’t have a camera crew following her around anymore.”
I nodded at the house. “And you didn’t check to see if she’s in there?”
“I started to ….” Jerry trailed off. “I thought I saw someone moving around inside, but it’s hard to tell because all the windows are boarded up. I stood outside, yelling her name, but no one came out.”
“But you didn’t go inside.”
I saw a momentary flash of shame on Jerry’s face, then his eyes turned small and angry. “If I’d gone inside, I wouldn’t be standing out here wondering what the hell’s going on, would I?”
I almost said something snide, but I kept my mouth shut. After all, who was I to talk? The private detective who was afraid to go into the woods at night.
“You could’ve called the police,” I said.
Jerry scoffed. “Yeah, sure. No offense, but if this turns out to be nothing, I’d rather be chewed out by you than the cops.” He looked over at the house. “But I don’t think this is nothing. I’ve got a real bad vibe.”
“They could be working in there,” I said, even though I didn’t believe it myself. I didn’t share Jerry’s bad vibe, but I had to admit it was kind of unsettling to see Julie Spiro’s car and the workmen’s van parked next to an abandoned house way out here in the middle of nowhere. “Maybe they’re pulling an all-nighter.”
Jerry shook his head. “I haven’t got the power turned back on yet. They wouldn’t be working in the dark.”
He had me there.
“Okay, we’ll check it out. But if this does turn out to be nothing, you’re buying me breakfast.”
“Deal,” Jerry said in a flat voice.
I got a flashlight out of my car and started across the road. I realised Jerry wasn’t following me and turned back to see him standing on the gravel shoulder. He looked like a little kid waiting for a school bus that was never going to come. He was staring at the flashlight in my hand.
“Where’s your gun?” he asked.
“In my closet at home.”
“What’s it doing there?” Jerry’s voice quivered with nervous anger. “I call and tell you there’s a potential supernatural menace in the house I’m renovating and you don’t even bring a gun?”
“You didn’t tell me anything,” I reminded him. “You just asked me to come out here.”
Jerry frowned and marched over to his car. For a second, I thought he was going to get in and drive away. Instead, he opened the trunk, dug around inside for a bit and took out a tire iron.
“Okay,” he said, “let’s go.”
There were no streetlights on this stretch of road and the moon had set hours ago. It was dark, but the faintest hint of dawn was creeping up in the east, like a rheostat turned to its lowest setting.
I played my flashlight back and forth across the front of the house. You didn’t need to be a private detective to figu
re out it had been empty for some time. The red-brick façade was faded and crumbling; the roof was slumped and full of holes; and the front lawn was so overgrown that the flagstone path leading up to the front door had become a trench.
As we walked up, I noticed that the windows were covered with sheets of plywood. A common-enough sight at any abandoned building, until I noticed the second-floor windows had been boarded up, too. That was a little more unusual. Kids and homeless people — the two groups most powerfully drawn to abandoned buildings — didn’t typically travel around with ladders.
When we reached the front door, I looked over at Jerry. “Ready?”
He gripped the tire iron in both hands. “Ready.”
I turned the knob and pushed the door open. The hinges let out a long, drawn-out squeak that was so cliché I was suddenly sure this entire situation was going to turn out to be a silly misunderstanding.
That feeling evaporated the moment I saw the body lying on the floor.
Jerry saw it, too — caught starkly in the beam of my flashlight, it was impossible to miss — and pushed past me into the house.
“Jerry, wait!”
“It’s Julie!”
I followed him inside, swinging my flashlight around as I crossed the small foyer and stepped through an archway into what was probably a living room, when there were people living here. Jerry crouched next to Julie. She was lying facedown on the dusty floor. She was wearing a grey suit-jacket and a matching skirt. A single slingback high-heeled shoe hung from one foot; the other was bare.
“Come on,” Jerry said, his voice brimming with panic. “Help me.”
I knelt down next to him and passed him the flashlight. He directed the beam at Julie’s head while I pressed two fingers against the side of her neck. I found a pulse.
“She’s alive,” I said, and Jerry let out a sigh of relief. “But we’ve got to get her to a hospital.”
I heard a board creak behind us. I looked over my shoulder. Jerry whipped the flashlight around at the same time, revealing two men standing in the doorway. One of them was short with a crewcut; the other was tall with sideburns and a mullet. They were wearing matching grey coveralls, the kind that typically has the owner’s name embroidered over the breast. I couldn’t tell if these did because most of the material was covered in some sort of fuzzy blue gunk. Their faces were covered with it, too. Only a few patches of skin showed through and their eyes, which stared at us with matching blank expressions.
“Hey, guys,” I said. “We could use a hand here.”
I didn’t expect them to help and I wasn’t disappointed. There was something about the way they were standing there, motionless, covered in that blue stuff, that told me there was something seriously wrong here.
As I watched, the workman on the left turned his head to the side, opened his mouth wide and vomited something thick and dark onto the wall. Jerry panned the flashlight over. The stuff appeared to be a syrupy version of the same blue fuzz that covered the workmen.
“What is it?” Jerry said with disgust.
I shook my head. “It looks like some sort of mould or fungus. They’re both infected with it.”
“And spreading it,” Jerry said. He shined the flashlight on the tall, mulleted workman as he bent over at the waist and vomited a blue stream on the floor between his feet.
I picked up the tire iron Jerry had left on the floor and swapped him for the flashlight. “Take Julie into the other room.” I nodded at the door behind us. “I’ll hold them off.”
Jerry stuck the tire iron under his arm, lifted Julie by the shoulders and started dragging her toward the door. “I bet you’re wishing you brought your gun now,” he grunted under his breath.
When they were safely away, I stood up and pointed the flashlight at the two workmen. “Do you understand me?”
They didn’t acknowledge me in any way, except to each take a step toward me. Then another. I kept the flashlight trained on them, as if I could hold them in place by keeping them centred in the beam. They kept coming.
I thought about using the flashlight as a weapon, but I knew I’d only get in a lick or two before the bulb broke. Then I’d be trapped in the dark with them.
I put the flashlight on the floor, directing the beam at the workmen. It only reached up to their knees, but it was better than nothing. I stepped in front of the beam and my shadow leaped across the floor in front of me. I decided to try something and took a quick bouncing step to the left. The workmen turned their heads to follow me, but it was a slow, robotic movement. I felt a small flutter of hope. Whatever was controlling these men, it didn’t seem to have the full, quick response of their reflexes. It might be possible to dart around them and make it out the front door.
But I couldn’t leave Jerry and Julie to fend for themselves. I didn’t have my cell phone. Even if I did, the nearest help was still thirty minutes away. I had to incapacitate these men, somehow; preferably without killing them.
The short, crewcut workman came at me in a stiff-legged shamble with his hands outstretched. The moment he got into range, I turned to the side and threw a straight jab at his face. The workman’s head snapped back and blood dribbled out of his nose. He came at me again, managed to loop his right arm around my neck and pulled me in close, like he wanted to tell me a secret. I went along with the motion, turning into his body, then grabbed his arm with both hands and flipped him over my shoulder. He landed on his back with a loud thud, sending up a cloud of dust that hung in the low-angled beam of the flashlight.
The other workman came shuffling forward. He was bigger than me and I wasn’t confident that I’d be able to handle him as efficiently as I had his friend. I glanced over at the man I’d just dumped on the floor. He wasn’t moving and that worried me. I didn’t want to kill these guys. Whatever was wrong with them wasn’t their fault and it might even be curable.
With that in mind, I picked up the flashlight and retreated to the other room.
I closed the door and put my back to it. A few moments later, I felt the workman slam into it from the other side. The fungus might have slowed him down, but it didn’t take away any of his strength. I panned the flashlight around. I was in the kitchen. The appliances were long gone, but I could see the outlines of where they had once stood. Jerry had dragged Julie Spiro over to the door that opened onto the backyard. He looked at me with wide, frightened eyes.
“One down,” I said. “One to go.”
“What the hell’s wrong with them?”
“I’m guessing it’s the house,” I said through gritted teeth, as another blow struck the door.
“But it doesn’t make any sense,” Jerry said desperately. “I’ve been through this place a dozen times and I’m completely fine.”
“That’s debatable.” I suddenly thought of something. “The people who died here, you said they were killed at night?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you ever go through this place at night?”
Jerry thought about it for a moment. “No,” he said. “It was always during the day. Julie wouldn’t let me take her here at night. She thought I’d try to put the moves on her.” He looked down at her sadly. “She was probably right.”
“If there’s a portal somewhere in the house and it’s spitting out this fungus, then it’s probably only happening when the conditions are right.”
Jerry nodded. “There’s no sun in the Black Lands. And fungus grows in dark places.”
“Except fungus doesn’t turn people into mindless zombies,” I pointed out.
“Unless it’s a supernatural fungus.”
“You’re gonna have to come up with something better than that if you’re going to put it in your next book.”
Jerry looked suddenly worried, as if this were the real problem at hand. I shined the flashlight in his face to snap him out of it.
“Why don’t you check and see if Julie’s okay?”
Jerry nodded. “Right, right.”
There was
another blow against the door. I was pretty sure I could keep it closed, at least until Jerry got Julie out of the house and around to his car. Then I could follow them and we could all get the hell out of this place.
I kept the light on Julie as Jerry gently turned her over onto her back. I had seen her before, on her TV show, and I always thought she was an attractive woman. At first glance, my opinion hadn’t changed. Then I saw the dark-blue beard that furred her cheeks and chin.
Jerry made a startled gasping sound and recoiled away.
Julie’s eyes snapped open. So did her mouth and a blue froth burbled out.
I took a step toward Jerry as the workman slammed into the door again. I moved back and put my shoulder to it.
“Jerry, get out of here,” I yelled. “You can’t help her.”
Jerry didn’t hear me or he didn’t care. He pulled himself up and leaned over Julie’s prostrate form. Her head tilted back and, before I could do or say anything, she spewed a stream of gooey blue gunk all over the front of Jerry’s shirt.
Jerry jerked back with a strangled cry. He managed to keep his feet under him and stumbled over to the back door. Julie sat up and started climbing slowly to her feet. Jerry looked at me, then back at Julie.
“Get out of here!” I yelled again. “Go!”
Jerry didn’t need to be told twice. Actually, he did. But what he lacked in responsiveness he more than made up for in speed as he turned on his heel and zipped out the door. Julie watched him go with the same blank expression I’d seen on the workmen’s faces. Then she turned and looked at me.
I had to move, but I knew the moment I stepped away from the door, the workman would come barrelling through. Then I’d have to deal with two infected people instead of one. But if I stayed where I was, Julie would have me cornered. I had to make a decision, and fast.
I stepped away from the door and waited for the workman to come through. I heard his fists slam against the door and then a thought struck me. I never heard him try the knob. Not even when I first closed the door on him. Maybe he didn’t try it because he didn’t think of it. Because the fungus didn’t think of it.
I was brought out of this reverie by Julie Spiro’s hands clamping around my throat. They were small hands, but her grip was incredibly strong. I spun around and she turned with me. Her shoulder clipped the wall and one of her hands came loose. I was able to pull her other hand off, push her away from me and escape through the back door.