A Corpse's Nightmare

by Phillip DePoy

  “The nurse at the information counter,” Andrews said softly, standing in the doorway to the kitchen. “What’s this about Melissa?”

  “Becky called me right after you all left,” Skid said. “She wanted to tell me that you had got her to thinking, and she said she did remember an older man in your room over these last couple of months. She said she hadn’t thought about it much because she just assumed you’d hired some outside help so that Lucinda could get on with her work and not all the time be running into your room to see how you were.”

  “Okay,” I said quickly, “but about Melissa.”

  “Right.” He nodded his head several times, trying to think of the right words. “Anyway, Becky told me that she was sorry to hear about Melissa and I said, ‘Sorry to hear about what?’ And she said ‘about her cancer.’”

  He let go another heart-cracking sigh. “I tried to act like I knew what she was talking about, so I said, ‘She seems to be doing all right.’ Which is true. But Becky said, ‘I don’t know, she was just in for another one of her treatments.’ So now I have to talk to Melissa and find out what’s going on.”

  “Skid,” I said, my hand still on his arm. “You know how tough she is.”

  “Yeah.” He drew himself up. “Anyway, I was headed out the door to find her when I saw your truck parked here. And then when I came over to, you know, tell you about everything, there you were, sitting with the mystery man. And when he saw me, he took off so fast I thought—I don’t know what I thought, really. I kind of lost it for a second. I mean, I just found out that you’d been asking about some stranger in your room, and from Becky’s description, there he was, sitting at the table with you—in Miss Etta’s diner. It was very … what’s the word?”

  “Surreal?” Andrews suggested.

  Skidmore shrugged.

  “Do you want someone with you when you talk to Melissa?” I asked.

  “God, no.” He scowled. “I think she doesn’t want anybody to know what’s going on with her. She would have told me.”

  “This Becky at the hospital,” I said, “just assumed that she had already told you. Because, ordinarily, she would have. That’s why you’re so worried.”

  “Right.” He closed his eyes. “I mean, I knew there was something wrong with her. She gets tired a lot now. She’s taken more sick days in the past several months than she has the whole time I’ve known her. She’s lost weight. I thought maybe she was worried about some boy or other. I never thought it was—this.”

  I could see his distress, and I felt it too. It didn’t matter then that I’d been in a coma, or that dreams and reality were mixed in my perceptions, or that a very odd stranger was dogging my path. I could even ignore the foul stench from the nearby Dumpster. At that moment, I was only one of three men in a back alley of a small town in the mountains, worrying about a sweet young woman who was in trouble.

  Images of Melissa filled my head. During her tenure as a deputy she’d risked her life a dozen times or more, broken into a murderer’s hotel room, jumped into the Nantahala River to save two elementary school children, and fired her pistol often in the line of duty. But a half-hearted hello from a boy who was beginning to like her: that would send her into paralysis. It was truly said that she was the shyest woman on the planet.

  There had been rumors about a possible affair between Skidmore and Melissa for years, partly because of their working relationship, mostly because small minds in small towns are open to a limited number of choices when it comes to relationships between men and women. Gossip is gossip the world around.

  Part of the reason Skidmore was so upset, the psychologist in my head told me, was that he had conflicting feelings at that moment. He was genuinely terrified that something might happen to Melissa, a person about whom he cared deeply. But he was also afraid that if he showed his emotions too plainly, some people in town would nod wickedly, assuming that they knew what carnal bonds lay at the root of his concern. The conflict between those two tensions was the true cause of his anger at us, and his deepest distress.

  “Talk to Girlinda about this,” I said on impulse.

  He looked up. At first, the anger rose to the surface again, but it only took a second for him to realize how much talking to his wife would help. She would absolve him of any conflicting feelings. She knew there was nothing to the rumors about Melissa and Skidmore—knew it in her marrow. She would comfort him, she would worry about Melissa, and she would begin to cook. Food was more to her than physical nourishment to her; it was a metaphorical sustenance, a spiritual communion.

  “Okay,” he said after a moment. “Good idea.”

  Then I realized, quite suddenly, that we were uncovering one of the reasons Skidmore hadn’t had as much success in the matter of my assault as he usually had. He’d not only had to work with less help from Melissa, he’d also been worried about her; distracted. No wonder, I thought to myself, he was so overwrought.

  “Look,” I began, my voice assuming a tone that I felt was quite authoritative, “I’ve been going at my problem in a completely incorrect manner.”

  Skid and Andrews turned my way.

  “I’ve been flailing around like a man who was shot and sank into a coma,” I continued. “Like someone who’s lost in the labyrinth of his own thoughts and experiences and dreams.”

  “Again the labyrinth?” Andrews sighed.

  “But you were shot, and you were in a coma, and you’re almost always lost in your own thoughts,” Skidmore told me impatiently. “How the hell do you think you’re supposed to be acting now?”

  “I am supposed to be acting like myself,” I answered him, “looking at someone else. I am supposed to be using the same techniques I would use on anyone else under these same circumstances. I’ve been letting events shape my perceptions rather than allowing my perceptions observe the events.”

  Andrews got it. “You’ve been letting the facts change your skills rather than using your skills to attack the facts.”

  “Exactly!”

  Skidmore blinked. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “I’m going to Fit’s Mill,” I said quietly, “to do field research, investigate a cultural history. Only this time, instead of looking for other people’s stories, I’m researching my own personal folklore, the stories of my family. My history.”

  “I see.” Skid got it. “Well, I’m going to have to play the role of sheriff now, and tell you not to do that. Tell you not to do that. I’m not asking. I’m not explaining. You are to go home now and quit interrupting my investigation. You are to leave off participating in these shady rendezvous situations with miscreants who might have tried to kill you. And I would prefer it if you’d just get in bed and stay there so that Lucinda won’t take a chaw out of my hide. You hear me?”

  I looked down. “I hear you.”

  “Fever,” he warned.

  “I understand,” I told him fervently.

  “If you get shot and killed again,” he said, “don’t come running to me.”

  “I’m on the job,” Andrews said, stepping up. “I’ll do the driving.”

  Skidmore shook his head. “Like that makes me feel better.”

  “I really will watch out for him,” Andrews said very seriously.

  “All right.” Skid rubbed his forehead for several seconds, sighing. “Well. I’ve got to go find Melissa. And I’ve got some other business to take care of that might just get us further down the road in the solving of your attack. So go home, and I mean it.”

  Andrews and I nodded as if we were both in church. Skidmore locked the back door to Miss Etta’s and disappeared down the alleyway.

  * * *

  We were halfway to Fit’s Mill before I managed to say to Andrews, “Thanks for driving this way and not back to my house.”

  “I could have wasted a good deal of the morning arguing with you about this, but the fact that I’d eventually lose was clear to me. And I heard what the old man said.”

  �
�Plus, third time’s a charm,” I allowed. “Why is that, exactly?”

  “Why is what exactly?”

  “Why is the third time a charm?” I specified.

  “Shakespeare,” he answered instantly.

  “No.” I shook my head. “Shakespeare isn’t the answer to everything.”

  “But in this case,” he chided me, “we have but to refer to the witches in Macbeth. ‘Thrice to thine and thrice to mine and thrice again, to make up nine. Peace! The charm’s wound up.’”

  “Well, I might give you its Scottish origin,” I admitted, “because it is listed in Alexander Hislop’s The Proverbs of Scotland. ‘The third time’s lucky.’ But that’s later—1800s. The expression’s been around longer than that, surely.”

  “And you think?” he asked.

  “I think we may have to go back to the Bible. The trinity seems pretty lucky to a lot of Christians.”

  “All right,” he argued, “if you’re going to do that, you might as well go back to Pythagoras. His entire mathematical gestalt was based on the number three, like it had magic. Why are we talking about this?”

  “To distract you,” I admitted. “To keep you from fully realizing that this little bit of sociological archaeology is liable to be fairly dangerous. We’re going to try to get into the meeting hall of some crazy supremacist organization and break into their basement vault. They have guns. What have I got with me? A Shakespeare scholar.”

  “No,” he corrected me instantly. “You have a kick-ass Rugby player with you. Haven’t you seen the bumper stickers? We eat our dead.”

  “Yes I know all that,” I answered. “I actually meant that your knowledge of Shakespeare would come in handy. If you try to beat them up, they’ll just shoot you. But if you try to talk to them about Shakespeare the way you usually do to me, they’ll be asleep in two minutes and we can just sneak past them. Like Cerberus after a sop.”

  “Ha-and-I-do-mean-ha.” He gripped the steering wheel.

  Once again we decided to go the slightly longer way around, avoiding the woods. The air sucked in through the open back window was very cold, and I didn’t see the point in risking more broken glass.

  The sun had ridden high into the late morning air, and there were no more snow clouds to be seen. The sky was a more springtime blue, even a robin’s egg blue, like something about to crack open.

  As we drove down the decaying roadway toward the nearly abandoned town, a sense of excitement took ahold of me. My chest thumped and my head was lighter.

  “I’m having an intuition,” I announced.

  “Well, roll down the window,” Andrew answered. “Don’t throw up in the truck.”

  “I’m going to find something important in the records they have downstairs in this building.”

  “If those men don’t kill us first,” he reminded me.

  “Right,” I agreed.

  Andrews nosed the truck forward toward the tumbledown building where we’d met with Travis and the Sons of Wingfield. About the size and shape of a small house, it looked different in the light of day. It actually looked more ominous than it had at night. The windows all had yellowed, stained newspaper in them to prevent anyone’s looking in. The building was made of wood, not bricks as I had misremembered. Most of the paint was gone, the wood was well rotted, and the roof was corrugated tin that was entirely covered in reddish rust and nut-brown kudzu vines. In a month or so, the roof would have a nice green head of leaves, and the kudzu would begin creeping downward to cover the front of the building, the windows, and the doors. Unchecked, it would engulf the entire town within a few years. And it didn’t appear that anyone in town had cared to stop it.

  “Do you have anything remotely resembling a plan?” Andrews wanted to know.

  “I don’t think you could call it a plan.” I opened the door to the truck before he’d come to a complete stop right in front of the building.

  As I was getting out and Andrews was pulling up the emergency brake, I noticed a small crest above the door, like a family shield from English peerage.

  “Hey,” I called to Andrews, “have a look at this. What does it look like to you?”

  “What does what look like?” He turned off the engine and climbed out of the cab.

  I pointed. He looked.

  “It’s a coat of arms,” he said, staring.

  We were looking at a shield with three sets of wings in a diagonal design on a stripe of red, a helmet of armor above it, a bit of ornate background, all topped with the motto: Fidélité est de Dieu—Faith is in God. I had to shift a little to the left to get the light on it just right, but then I could clearly read the name Wingfield at the bottom of the crest.

  “Well,” Andrews said softly, “it looks like the genuine item. I’ve seen a million of these things.”

  I stared up at it. “I’ve never quite been able to understand some people’s obsession with ancestry. Lineage is an accident, I think. I just haven’t ever put any stock in it.”

  “That’s because you’ve always secretly hoped that you were adopted,” Andrews said, only half in jest. “You’d rather not believe in family history because your family is so very, very strange.”

  “Fair enough,” I sighed.

  We stood a moment more, looking up at the Wingfield crest. I was trying not to think too much about it. Andrews was trying to peek into the building through the old newspaper in the windows. Neither of us was having much success.

  “Shall we?” I said finally.

  I put my hand on the door, turned the handle, but, of course, it was locked. Just as I was about to suggest that we go around back, as we had at Miss Etta’s with such success, we were startled nearly out of our wits by sudden, blasting music. Human voices created a wall of sound that rattled the windows of the little building, and shook the newspaper rags.

  “And am I born to die?” the song began. “To lay this body down? And must my trembling spirit fly into a world unknown?”

  “Do these people meet all the time?” Andrews whispered incredulously.

  “Didn’t Elder James tell us that this is a special season?” I asked just as softly. “I got the impression there’s some outside impetus for so much activity.”

  The song continued to spill out into the air.

  “I know this tune,” Andrews whispered, astonished. “Why would I know this song? Is it that Sacred Harp crap?”

  “A little reverence, please, for a genuine American folk art form,” I said, speaking barely over the music.

  “But I mean how would I know it?” he insisted.

  “Well, it’s possible that you know it because they used it in a movie called Cold Mountain.”

  “Oh.” He seemed a little less spooked. “I did see that movie. Creepy song, though.”

  “I think we can use this as our cover. We could slip into the basement while they’re distracted with their singing.”

  “You’re not serious.” He stood his ground. “You can’t possibly consider breaking into this place with those gun-toting crazies actually in it.”

  “I’m not leaving this town again empty-handed.” I knew that I wasn’t rational. I knew that I was being insane. I didn’t care. I simply pointed to the side of the building where several windows lay in the cinder-block foundation. “They seem like they’d be easy to get into. You can stand guard if you want to.”

  He glanced at the windows. “I hate this plan.”

  “It’s not so bad,” I reasoned, completely irrationally. “They’re occupied in there. We can hear everything they’re doing. We can keep tabs on them. If they stop singing, we’ll get out.”

  “You don’t think they can hear us too?” he said, barely audibly. “The truck pulling up, the door slamming, our voices before they started singing? They heard us before.”

  “Maybe.” I shrugged. “But they don’t know it’s us.”

  “They don’t? They knew it last night!”

  “It’s part of the beauty of my current insanity. They’
d never believe we’d be stupid enough to come back here today. I mean, would you believe it? Didn’t they do their absolute best to scare us far, far away?”

  “One should have thought,” he opined in his finest Noel Coward. “And yet, here we stand.”

  “But not for long,” I assured him, heading for the side of the building. “I’m going down into their basement. You can get back into the truck if you want to. You can be ready to take off in case there’s trouble.”

  He actually thought about it for a second before he said, “Lucinda would kill me dead if I left you here. And me she wouldn’t pack in snow and revive. I’d just be dead. Then she’d just leave my body on some lonesome mountainside to be eaten by crows and, I don’t know, bobcats.”

  “Probably right,” I agreed over my shoulder.

  “You do realize that you’ve completely lost your mind and we’ll probably be killed.”

  “Uh-huh,” I agreed. “So why are you going along with me?”

  He shrugged. “Because you said you had an intuition. And when you say that, you’re almost always right. What did Lucinda tell me? That you have a habit of being right when most people think you’re not, something like that? So, it’s really her fault that I’m in this with you. Our murders will be on her conscience.”

  “Nice bit of pretzel logic,” I said, smiling.

  I knelt down beside the first window. These weren’t covered and I could see in. Dimly lit tables and file cabinets filled the space. I put my face close to the glass. The place was unkempt but seemed to be organized—after a fashion. I put my hand on the lower part of the window and pushed. It didn’t budge. The singing in the hall seemed to grow louder. I looked up at Andrews.

  “I might have to break the glass,” I said softly.

  “Try the other windows first, Igmo.”

  “Igmo?” I glared up at him.

  But I did slide over and try the other windows—with no luck. I absently took in a few more lyrics in the remarkably loud hymn: “And see the Judge with glory crowned, and see the flaming skies!”

  “Now can I break a window?” I insisted, crouching down by the one farthest from the front of the building.