Works in development for screen include Pay the Ghost, children's spooky animated film My Haunted House, his script Playtime (written with Stephen Volk), and Exorcising Angels (with Simon Clark).
Find out more about Tim at his website www.timlebbon.net
Cold Fear
Lucien Soulban
The first thing you learn about being dead is that you’re always cold, whiskey-on-the-rocks-without-the-whiskey cold. The second thing about being dead means you’re handcuffed to hundreds of rules, the two big ones being don’t let the living catch on to you, and don’t fuck with the Umirta.
Unfortunately for me, breaking those two rules is what I do best. It’s like I’m just dying to cross them off my list, which is probably why I’m getting punched in the gut right now.
Two mooks are nice enough to be holding my jacket. That I happen to be wearing it right now troubles them none. The third mook is busy tuning my ribs with his fists, and I don’t think he likes what he hears. Their faces are flat like someone took a hot iron to the wrinkles they called lips, noses, and eyebrows. Their eyes are two tunnels cored into their heads, their corkscrew walls writhing. There’s a dull light at the back of their skulls; I figure it’s where sunshine goes to catch the flu. That’s the Umirta for you. They look like any other suits except for those haunt-your-dream eyes.
With a grunt, he starts up on me again; the iron brass knuckles slam into my gut and damn near connect with my spine. I’m getting punched with fire; iron is hell on the gauze we call bodies. Then he lays one across my jaw, blowing out half my face into a misty powder. Iron does that to ghosts, screwing with whatever holds us together. As I’m reeling, my insides screaming in a way they aren’t supposed to, he grabs my head and looks at me with those spiral eyes. I figure with half my face missing, nobody’s gonna ask me to the prom neither.
“That’s strike two,” he says with a voice that comes from somewhere behind a mask of ghost scar. “If you’re smart, you’ll keep your trap shut.”
They leave me curled up in a ball, my body one solid lump of a nerve screaming falsetto. I don’t need to be a fortune teller to know there’s a third strike in my future—if there isn’t, I’ll never figure out why the Umirta doesn’t want me looking into my own murder.
* * *
It’s a cold, miserable day in Columbian City when I pick myself up and stagger away. My face is trying to crawl back into place like a whipped dog. I still couldn’t tell you why they have a beef with me, but this is the same appetizer they been feeding me for weeks now.
The rain slips through me like the whisper of a knife, and I can’t help but remember my final minutes. The second I drew my last lungful of factory air, I knew I was gonna miss breathing, miss smoking, miss—well—everything.
I stumble across the street and head into the Slab, a kind of Speakeasy for the dead. Around here, it’s hard to pick out the human slobs sitting at the bar and the ghosts sitting right next to them. The breathers don’t know we’re around and we pretty much tune them out. The living make life look so boring, sometimes. The Slab serves the best rot on this side of the veil. We don’t ask what they found deadside to ferment, and they don’t much say other than “You don’t wanna know.” Nobody’s about to look that horse in the mouth. Too many flies buzzing around.
The ghostside bar’s stocked with furniture that got eaten from a fire somewhere around ‘22. A couple of ghosts in here are the same vintage, sipping from the same cracked glasses that bought it back then. I’m on my third glass of blue-colored rot and touching the loose skin around my sore jaw when Sugar comes waltzing up. He’s sporting his straw fedora and short sleeve blue shirt, looking like he’s summering in the hereafter. He smiles when he spots me, his teeth the kind of story dentists talk about around the campfire. His eyes are sunken, drowning somewhere in the back of his skull. He sits on the teetering stool next to me, too skinny to tip it over even when he was pulling air.
“What’s shaking?” he says, grinning. Then he notices my face. “Brother, you don’t learn, do you?”
“Go away,” I say. I’m in no mood for him. My body hurts in ways they never tell you about.
“Don’t fuck with the Umirta.”
I tip the glass his way. “Plenty of other bad things out there.”
“Yeah?” he says. “And how many of them work the face and gut.”
He’s got a point.
“I got something for you,” Sugar says. He reaches into his breast pocket and dangles something in my face between two fingers. I’m staring at a badge, my badge. The metal’s dull and mean with that heavy nickel silver, the eagle rubbed of detail, but the words stick: Private Detective.
“Where—?” I say.
“So we cooking with gas or what?” Sugar says.
“I’m not buying what’s already mine.”
“No, you ain’t,” he said. “You’re buying the reason I got it.”
I stare at him the Chicago way, but he isn’t flinching. “What do you want?” I ask. “I’m not swimming in dough here.”
Sugar looks around like he suddenly remembered he’s on the lam. “That’s not what I hear.”
“Yeah, well, what you hear can land you dead.” I look him over. “Deader,” I admit.
Sugar grins with that white picket fence smile that looks like a couple of kids took a hickory bat to it. “So what do I got to lose, right?”
“Plenty,” I say into my glass. Fine. He wants to walk under a ladder while a black cat’s crossing his path, that’s his problem. I reach into a hidden pocket in my sleeve and slide him a gold double eagle coin. He looks around, making sure nobody else is watching and moves to take it, but my hand stays where it is.
“Talk.”
“Someone took a torch to your old office,” Sugar says quickly, eyeing the coin. “I saw the fire and jumped on it before anyone else got there.”
“Prescott?” I ask.
Sugar shrugs. “Didn’t stick around to ask for names, but no breathers or ghosts were around when I amscrayed.”
“What else did you take that might have my name on it?”
He hesitates, but we both know the gold’s worth more than a crate full of badges. He nods and drops the badge in my hand. He lifts his shirt and shows me a revolver tucked into my blackened leather shoulder holster. It’s my snubbie, a Colt Detective Special. He slides the piece my way and takes the gold coin, holding it and feeling the weight.
“Man, this thing’s really solid,” he says.
I know what he means. Most things that end up deadside don’t feel entirely there. These coins, though, they got something to them. I also wish I could say I feel the weight of the coin leave me, but there’s more where that came from. For the first time since I arrived in this private corner of Hell, though, I’m armed with five bullets.
“Bad lucks follows those things,” I tell Sugar.
Sugar smiles as he folds it in his pocket as smooth as a greased magician. “Yeah, but bad air still tastes good to a drowning man.”
* * *
These two square blocks of city are the drain that my life circled. I look at the spot where I died, and I can’t tell one stain from another—my blood’s one of these dark patches on the cement. I look up at my office window. Sure, the view stank, but now it looks like someone punched it in the eye; the glass is broken and soot blackens the frame.
I walk through the first story window like it’s mist, through the accounting firm where fat Leroy punches in numbers and flips the crank on an adding machine; through the frosted glass door where that brunette Mary stops typing long enough to shiver. I head up the old stairs and corridor where someone took a disliking to the office door; all that’s left of the frosted glass is “& Prescott Detective Agency.” My name’s gone. Figures.
David Prescott, my former partner, stands in what’s left of our office. He’s a lanky guy, with a lanky way about him. The suit hangs off him, but he’s got a way with the ladies despite his ‘aw shucks’ smil
e. He won’t see me; he might feel a draft, or maybe the hairs on the back of his neck might salute, but he’s focused on the torched office.
It’s darker in here than I remember, the shadows clinging to the room like smoke in a jazz joint. Temperature drops too, and I expect to see my breath on the air. I don’t, of course, but only two things get this cold for the dead: Chicago in January and the presence of a hound, a lost dog.
I don’t see the hound, but it sees me, I can tell by the way it’s panting. It’s camouflaged in the shadows, ash smoke against the deep indigo tar, and it’s stalking David for some reason. Now it’s got my smell. I consider pulling my Colt on this thing, but an eternity is a long time to be nursing five bullets. I reach for a chair, but my hand passes through it. Same damn joke gets me every time.
This thing could come from anywhere, and I back away from the door slowly, up against the wall behind me. I try to pass through, but walls aren’t as temporary as doors and windows are and this building’s solid with old. It’s like trying to push through winter sap, and I’m halfway through the wall when the hound’s snout pokes through the open door.
The Umirta snatches dead dogs up, peels off their outer fur just to turn them meaner than dying did, and makes them the kind of smart you could cut your wrists on. Its eyes find me, two dimes of hellfire above a row of teeth that belong in a butcher’s rack. Its skin is missing, flayed off with an obsidian skinning knife, leaving glistening tar-colored muscles showing. It growls and I push harder, but my arms are trapped in the flypaper wall; what in hell was I thinking?
It leaps just as my head vanishes into the stucco. I’m surrounded in darkness, my ears and eyes muffled. A sharp pain shoots up my thigh and screams in my head. My leg’s exposed and muffy’s using it for a chew toy. I kick blind and hit something solid. Maybe I hear a yelp, maybe I don’t, but it’s back at my foot before my head clears the wall and I can see again.
A couple of seconds later, I manage to pull my foot through. If I was still alive, the tangled mess of shredded leg would have to go. Instead I’m full of phantom limb hurt, my head telling me how it’s supposed to feel. I writhe on the carpet of some office while people come and go. I’m coming to hate them, the breathers. How can they be so dense? Why the hell can’t they see or hear me?
My leg stitches itself up, right down to the tweed fabric of the last thing I wore when I bought it. Tough stuff, ectoplasm, but not tough enough.
“Get up, you sonofabitch,” I mutter, forcing myself up into a hobble. Hounds don’t give up that easy; they don’t got the will to go through walls too fast, but doors are something else. No sooner do I think that when it pushes through the door like it’s going through a net. I go for the heavily scarred snout and earn a howl of pain. Now it really wants my balls. It takes willpower to ignore physics, and hounds got enough tenacity to fight its way through, but the door slows it down, snaring its hind legs.
I tackle the beast and wrap my arms around its neck. Bastard’s strong and damn near bucks me off, but I’ve got leverage. When it slams my head into the upper frame, I realize leverage isn’t all it’s cracked up to be and what am I gonna do? Snap its neck? Suffocate it?
“You’re about as useful as a pair of balls on a corpse,” I growl at myself. So I grab the mutt by its ears and wrench it all the way through the door. I like to think of it as the world’s nastiest Indian burn. It yelps and I slide back into the corridor. I need something to hurt it and that extra second it takes for that thing to come after me is all I need.
I run for our broken office where David’s pulling things apart, looking for whatever survived the blaze, and almost everything is in ruins. Whatever’s broken this bad has weight here, like my badge. I grab for a burnt wooden chair leg and my hand flies through it. Not broken enough. I hear the hound scramble into the room. I grab another leg and my fingers connect with the broken reflection.
The hound’s on my back, going after my neck, its claws digging into my ribs. I roar in pain as its dagger teeth slice chunks of my ether. I slam backwards into the wall, done with playing nice. The wall’s like rock for it, but it hangs on. I strike once, twice, and lucky number three feels this thing let go. It’s partially stuck inside the wall, struggling to shake free. I swing and crack the hound in the ribs with my makeshift bat.
“How’d you like that?” I yell, swinging over and over again until it’s not fighting back any more. I feel like I should be breathing hard, but nothing. I just feel angry, my nerves clenched in a red hot fist while I ram the narrower end into the hound outta spite.
The beast shivers and then expires, a nice clean word for something worse than dying. At least dying ends you up somewhere, but when a ghost expires, its nothing but mist in a strong wind. People make for stronger spooks than most animals that end up here, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be swept under the rug. At least it won’t be running home to master and leading them to me.
David looks around the room, that small crease in his forehead telling me he’s concerned. Maybe he heard or sensed us, but he pauses to study the room. I just watch him work; I stopped trying to be seen, be heard, months ago. It’s enough to drive a ghost crazy with a capital Z, and there’s plenty of crazy ghosts running around already.
So I focus on why the Umirta sent a hound after him? The Umirta have their hands deep in plenty of nasty business, and nothing’s saying the hound and my death are connected, but it’d be real helpful if they were. I’m just too damn dim and stubborn to follow more than one investigation.
It’s when David turns over a sheet of fallen plaster that something catches my eye; a gold coin, a double eagle under some debris. David doesn’t see it, his attention on the burnt case files he just unearthed, but I reach for the coin. I touch it and it’s cold and heavy like someone poured a pound of lead into its guts. It’s also solid on both sides of the curtain that keeps the living and the dead divided, and I know I could just pull it into the deadside, my side, and David would never see it again.
David grunts in frustration and lets the plaster sheet drop, breaking it. I wait for him to notice the coin a foot to his left and the thing right next to it, but his eyes are distant. He gets up and moves away.
“Turn around, you fucking idiot!” I bark, but David’s always had his head in the clouds. It was damn hard getting him to pay attention even when I was still breathing.
That gold coin’s the clue, the coin and what’s next to it are why all this is happening. Hell, I know for a fact it’s the reason I took a dive in the alley. It’d be easy turning him around. All I gotta do is focus and flip the plaster wall and scare the bejeezuz outta him, but that’s a big no-no. Make someone think they got a genuine haunting or a big case of the unexplained, and the Umirta knows. I can’t say who put ‘em in charge or why, but they run business like it’s the family business and I’m not willing to ring that doorbell just yet.
I can’t scare David, but there’s always a loophole when it comes to arrangements, and this particular loophole’s called coincidence. I reach for the cracked coffee mug teetering on the edge of a fallen picture. I put some will behind it like I’m pushing a car out of a rut, and the cup spills over and rolls across the floor with a rattle. David jumps and sees the cup rolling to a stop. He relaxes, probably figuring the cup was balanced on something when he was moving debris. Coincidence. So long as he justifies it, I’m in the clear.
David leans over to scoop up the cup, and I mutter, “Look at the damn coin. It’s right there.”
He’s about to stand when he catches the glint of gold.
“Attaboy,” I say.
He picks it up and examines it, flipping it end-over-end with those lanky fingers of his that make me think of spiders doing ballet. He notices that other thing next, the strap of the small dusty money purse I’d hid in the vent. It’s split open, bleeding a couple of coins, but it’s the embroidery he notices: AdlC. It’s in that moment that I hope to whatever God’s running this dog-and-pony show that he starts
to put two-and-two together.
* * *
Staying in a car is easy if you put a mind to sticking to your seat, but for a minute, it feels normal, and I need a shot of normal right about now. Dave’s driving, W7JJ belting out Big Band medleys in a rolling rumble, and I’m just talking to think things out.
“Just like old times,” I say.
David reaches over and turns down the radio before a bewildered look saddles his mug. I know he’s thinking, “Why’d I do that?” and I laugh. He did that whenever we worked a case and I started yammering. He hesitates, one hand hovering over the knob.
“I gotta say, buddy, this whole deal stinks,” I say, and lo and behold, he leaves the radio low and goes back to driving. His grip’s tight on the stitched leather, and I know he’s thinking too. We didn’t talk much then, either. So it really is just like old times.
David pulls up Woodlawn Avenue. The brownstones fall back, leaving oak trees in autumn gold and manicured lawns to creep in. After a minute, it’s like the city never existed; this is where Columbian’s rich folks live, the forefather architects of the city that sprung up from the roots of the World Fair. They’ve got their mansions scattered in the heart of this great park, hidden from each other by trees and manufactured d-cup hills and a rolling mist that bleeds off the ground. Spooks don’t like it here and I’m treading dangerous waters. This is Columbian’s downtown, and more business gets done here than the neighboring Chicago Loop.
The car cleaves the mists, but David can’t see what I’m looking at, the way the fog grabs at the windows like it’s looking for traction. It wants me, and I’m damned if I ever had to hoof it through Woodlawn Park. Ghosts have tried and those that survived have had their mouths sewn shut. I’m in Umirta territory, I can feel it.
Woodlawn curves around the park like a snake. The road splits with quaint signs pointing to old money whose family names are one part history and two parts infamy. David angles for a road of crushed gravel marked: “de la Croix.” A tall gate made from wrought iron appears from outta the fog.
Streets of Shadows Page 28