A Corpse's Nightmare

by Phillip DePoy

  “Can you do it quietly?” he whispered.

  I nodded and began to use my fingernails to chip away at the ancient molding around one of the panes of glass. I thought it might be possible for me to dislodge the pane without breaking it, just lift it away, and reach in to open the whole thing. It would take a bit longer, but it would certainly be quieter.

  But Andrews would not be pleased. “What’s taking so long?”

  Irritated, I picked at the brittle putty faster, and in another minute—a span of time made longer by tension—the windowpane came free. I reached in and pushed the lock. The window creaked, but opened wide enough for me to crawl through, headfirst, eventually managing to put my hands on the cluttered table against the wall under the window. I did my best to be careful, but the posture was awkward, and several file folders or large envelopes slid off the table and patted onto the floor.

  “Sh!” I could hear Andrews entreat me.

  Alas, it was at that moment that the folly of my endeavor came clear: there I was, half in and half out of the basement records library of an organization of raving, rabid lunatics. I was forced to wonder if, perhaps, my mind might not be working properly after all, and that everyone else had been right. Maybe I should have been at home in bed.

  That moment did not so much pass as dissolve into the next, and I found myself floundering ridiculously on the disordered tabletop before I managed to find relative stability standing on the dirt floor of the basement.

  Having seen my little ballet, Andrews decided that a different approach would be better and so came in feetfirst. It was not, after all was said and done, any better an idea. His feet hit the table, but could find no purchase, and he slid out of control, genuinely injuring his back as it scraped on the windowsill.

  But there we were, the lame and the halt, in the midst of the Backwoods Branch of the Official Library of Hell. A small smoke of dim light managed to filter in through the dirty windows. It gave the entire endeavor a rancid luster. The space was lined with tables, cabinets, old crates, cardboard boxes, and resembled nothing so much as a hoarder’s attic. At one end where the back door would have been there was a rickety wooden staircase that obviously led to the meeting hall. The walls were unpainted cinder block; the floor was dry, packed dirt. We stood staring for longer, much longer than we should have, just looking around before we got to work, randomly, examining files and cabinets.

  “You realize this is hopeless,” Andrews whispered. “There’s absolutely no system to any of this.”

  I nodded and kept looking.

  After what seemed like days, I realized that there was, in fact, a system. It was not linear, and it was not alphabetical, but it was a system. The entire “library” was organized by states. It was laid out according to a map of America. It began with the northern-most states at the end near the stairs, and at the opposite end in the corner was the section on Florida. Further quick investigation of this phenomenon uncovered the fact that only the original thirteen colonies were represented. When I finally pointed out this system to Andrews, he confessed that he’d already given up.

  “Okay,” he shrugged, his voice hushed. “But look at this.”

  He showed me a hand-drawn map of Delaware. On the back there had been written the names of dozens of Dutch families. The page looked very old.

  “No,” I said quickly, “I mean, this section over here? It’s Georgia.”

  I pointed.

  He shrugged.

  “Fine,” I said, apparently to myself.

  I stumbled over boxes in the dirt, and made it to the haphazard section concerning the mountainous regions of my state, and with very little effort after that, found a part of file cabinet concerning Blue Mountain.

  A quick pawing through that enclave revealed a folder with the name Devilin on it. Even though I had been certain I would find something like that, I was still a little taken aback. I took a second deciding if I really wanted to see what was in it or not, but curiosity was a powerful demon. I opened.

  As I leafed through the several dozen pages—cryptic notes, official government documents, letters, a few old photographs—I had the dizzying sensation that I was looking at the contents of the missing tin box, the one stolen from my home. I was certain that some of the things I saw there had even been in that box, or the one from my mother’s secret hiding place. The name Newcomb appeared on many of the pages, but I told myself that it didn’t really matter: our town had been founded by the Newcomb family, a Newcomb had owned the weird traveling show that had employed my parents for most of their lives; surely there was nothing more than that to link my family with theirs.

  But something from the darker, watery depths of my subconscious was thrashing so violently that my dizziness increased and I was suddenly afraid that I might fall asleep again. I looked around desperately, trying to find something that might snap me out of my increasing stupor.

  Thank God Andrews noticed.

  “What is it?” he whispered, moving quickly to my side.

  “I found it,” I told him lamely, holding out the folder.

  “Okay, well, then, Jesus,” he stammered. “Let’s get out of here.”

  He took the folder out of my hands and moved with surprising agility toward the open window. He held out the folder and motioned to me as if he were trying to coax a wild animal out of his house.

  “Come on,” he said gently.

  I moved, wading through honey, not in complete control of my limbs. The sensation of impending sleep would not leave me. I shook my head furiously, eyes squeezed shut. I felt my knees weaken.

  Andrews wore a panicked look. He was clearly not certain what he should do.

  He was about to toss the folder and come to drag me out the window when a sudden noise froze us both. Someone was unlocking the door to the basement. A split second later there was a voice.

  “I heard it too,” Travis called to someone in the meeting hall. “I’ll check the traps. We got two really big rats last week. You know how they love to eat paper. Why do they eat paper?”

  Andrews was scrambling out the window in the next instant. I flew over the boxes in my way and clambered up on top of the table. My cohort’s legs were in my way. I pushed on his feet. He grunted and moved faster. I shot a look out past his bulk to make certain that he had the all-important folder in his hand.

  “Hey, gee, you’uns hear that?” Travis called out. “Sounds big. Come on. I’m not going down there myself.”

  His hesitation gave me the extra seconds I needed to scrape out the window after Andrews, ripping my pants, skinning my hands, and hurting my left foot, the one with the missing toe.

  I dragged myself out onto the ground, the window slammed down, and Andrews took off running toward the truck.

  I scrambled up just in time to hear as significant a stream of cursing as I had ever known in my life. No deity, parent, or sexual activity escaped its scope. I assumed Travis and others had discovered that someone had broken into their Fortress of Decrepitude.

  I had barely made it to my feet when the first shots were fired.

  Running despite aches and pains and the lax muscles of the recently un-comatose, I nearly caught up with Andrews before the next shots whizzed past my head.

  “Christ!” I called out, ducking.

  “Fever?” Travis’s voice called out.

  Someone else yelled, “That sumbitch!”

  “Hold your fire, damn,” Travis yelled back. “Stop it!”

  I didn’t look back. I shot forward as fast as my legs could make me. Andrews was already in the truck and starting the engine. I was wheezing like a steam engine, but I made it to the door. Before I even opened it, Andrews began backing the truck up.

  “Wait,” I coughed, like a drowning man.

  “Come on, then!” he answered, not slowing the truck one whit.

  I managed to open the door and jump in just as he shoved the gearshift into first. He slammed down the accelerator, and instantly shifted into s
econd gear, spewing mud and slush and dead leaves everywhere behind us.

  We were a mile down the road before I realized what had happened.

  “Wait,” I said, my heart still threatening to explode. “Travis told them to stop shooting at us. And they did.”

  There hadn’t been a shot fired after Travis’s directive.

  I turned to look out the back of the truck where a perfectly nice rear window had once been.

  “And no one’s chasing us,” I continued. “Something’s weird.”

  “We just got shot at!” Andrews yelled. “Again!”

  “I know, but—”

  “Someone was trying to kill us!” He wouldn’t calm down. His face was red and his eyes were bulging.

  “But, see, when they saw that it was us, they stopped shooting.”

  He eased back on the pedal just a little. “They did?”

  “And they’re not behind us now. They’re not coming after us.”

  He glanced in the rearview mirror. “That is weird.”

  “He called my name. Travis called my name.” My breathing was still a little out of control.

  “What’s going on?” he asked, his face returning to its typical London pallor.

  “I don’t know.”

  I glanced down at the stolen folder that lay on the seat between us. Andrews saw that I was staring at it.

  “Go on,” he urged. “Have a look at the thing that almost got us killed. Again.”

  Against almost every fear I had to the contrary, I picked it up and began to examine its contents.

  After a time—seconds or hours, I had no idea—I offered my halting summary. “T-Bone Morton was, according to some of this information, a long-lost son of the jazz genius Jelly Roll Morton. T-Bone Morton and Lisa Simard, a woman from a famous French wine family, had a daughter. That baby was given to a member of the Newcomb family, the branch that lived in New Orleans. But one of them, a man called Jeribald ‘Tubby’ Newcomb, brought the girl to this part of Georgia. He was, as I have told you, one of the original founders of Blue Mountain. The records reveal—I mean, I think this is what they say: that the girl, T-Bone and Lisa’s daughter, a baby who had been smuggled out of Chicago on the run from men who wanted to kill her—that girl married a Devilin when she was seventeen.”

  “Wait,” Andrews said, letting his foot off the accelerator. “What?”

  “This is what the Earl of Huntingdon wanted me to find.” My shoulders sank as I truly relaxed for the first time in days.

  “I don’t understand,” Andrews said, turning to look at my profile.

  “That girl, the daughter of T-Bone and Lisa,” I said slowly, a smile coming to my lips, “was my maternal great-grandmother.”

  24.

  I couldn’t stop smiling for the rest of the drive back to my home. Andrews contributed to my mood significantly.

  “You get to be related to Jelly Roll Morton!” he kept saying.

  “It is a bit like finding out you were a descendent of George Washington,” I admitted.

  “Except George only founded a country,” Andrews said. “Jelly Roll invented Jazz.”

  “I want to study the things in the folder a little more closely,” I said. “I want to compare this stuff to the stuff in the box I found in my mother’s room. Plus, I think some of these things were in the other box, the famous blue box that was stolen from my home when I was shot.”

  “Why are there two boxes?” It was a simple question.

  “My parents were psychotically secretive. I believe that my mother hid information about a lot of things all over our house, buried in our yard, probably other places too. My father certainly buried money in different locations on our property. It’s actually possible that the stolen box could be one of dozens. But some of the things in this file were in that blue box, I’m almost certain.”

  “Hang—hang on.” Andrews stammered a bit soberly, “wouldn’t that mean the man who shot you has been to the meeting hall in Fit’s Mill—wait, one of the men who just shot at us back there might be the—Travis! Travis is the guy who tried to kill you!”

  He squirmed excitedly in his seat, having solved the crime.

  “Before the past couple of days,” I said, somewhat more skeptically, “I would have agreed with you. Completely. But now puzzling evidence to the contrary gives me pause.”

  “What evidence?”

  “You started it,” I told him. “Travis seemed to be trying to tell me who was trying to kill me. He has recently been much more cordial to me than he’s ever been. And just now he stopped his cohorts from shooting us.”

  “He can’t just gun you down on the main street of his home town,” Andrews objected, “especially knowing that your oldest friend is the sheriff of the next town over. Of course he told them to stop.”

  “Well, that’s a good point,” I admitted.

  “We have to tell Skidmore what’s just happened.” Andrews stepped on the accelerator again.

  “We have to tell Skidmore that we broke into a private library, stole documents, and fled the scene under gunfire?”

  “Well,” he demurred, “that’s not the way we’d say it.”

  “Exactly how would we say it?”

  “We’d say,” he told me emphatically, “that we think Travis is the one who tried to kill you. Skidmore would go arrest him and get the truth.”

  “But we don’t think that Travis is the one who tried to kill me.”

  “We don’t?” he asked.

  I looked down at the folder then, and realized something about it.

  “Hey,” I said. “This folder is a different color and kind from every other folder that was in the drawer about Blue Mountain. Look.”

  I held it up.

  “I can’t look, I’m driving,” he complained. “What is it?”

  “It’s not like any of the others in the drawer, I’m saying.”

  “So?”

  I set it back down on my lap. “I don’t know. But it means something. It might mean that the person who stole the things from my house, who tried to kill me, and who collected all of this information about this genealogy—that person might be from someplace else. Not from around here.”

  “Because it’s in a different-colored folder?” he asked.

  “Well,” I answered, looking down at it, “kind of.”

  “Has it concerned you at all,” Andrews began slowly, “that you’ve taken us on a series of very strange adventures in the past couple of days?”

  “Strange adventures?”

  “Well, for one thing,” he began, “I’ve been shot at more times in the past seventy-two hours than in the previous, say, six years.”

  “People often shoot at you when you’re with me. It’s not you, it’s me.”

  “That’s right,” he agreed a little too enthusiastically. “You’re the Kiss of Death, you are. But that’s not my point. These little escapades have been some of the most, I don’t know, surreal ever—and I think you’d agree: that’s saying something.”

  “You’re right about that too, but what’s your point?”

  “You’ve been sleeping for three months. Shortly before that, you were dead. I have to take everything you say with a whole shaker full of salt, and even then it doesn’t seem seasoned enough to eat.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Maybe you’re not entirely in command of your faculties,” he explained softly. “Maybe your interpretation of events isn’t the most stable.”

  I nodded. “I was just worrying about that,” I admitted, “when I was halfway through the window back there.”

  I was surprised to look up and discover that the trip had flown by. We were clattering up the mountain toward my house. For some reason, I was not surprised to see a police car in my yard.

  Skidmore was sitting on the front porch. Deputy Melissa Mathews was pacing back and forth. We hadn’t even pulled up into my yard before Skidmore was down the steps and headed toward my truck, talking.

 
; We couldn’t understand what he was saying, exactly, but the gist of it was clear: he was upset that we hadn’t done what he’d told us to do.

  By the time I got my car door open, he was rounding the truck toward me with a look of righteous fire in his eyes. He actually had his handcuffs out.

  “So I am officially arresting you,” he was saying, “and confining you to your home under penalty of the law, the harshest penalty I can come up with!”

  “What?” I managed to say before he took me by the arm.

  He was shoving me in the direction of my front porch and Andrews was loping beside us trying to figure out what was happening.

  “I’ve brought Deputy Mathews with me to enforce this injunction.”

  Melissa was trying very hard not to laugh.

  Skidmore hustled me up the steps and into my living room. He deposited me onto my sofa and began lumbering around me.

  “You leave the hospital before you’re supposed to. You won’t stay in bed and eat Girlinda’s soup. You gallivant all over the county. You get shot at! I mean, have you seen the back window of your truck!”

  “Well, of course,” I began.

  “Shut up!” he roared. “You are to stay in this house and keep away from any more investigation of anything beyond what to eat for lunch, you hear me? I have to drag Melissa off your own case and make her stay here to keep you from killing yourself because you won’t do what anybody tells you to do for your own good! Have you just been to Fit’s Mill?”

  “When I tell you what we found—” I began again.

  “Have you just been to Fit’s Mill?” he interrupted, louder than before. “Against my explicit instructions to the contrary?”

  “But the thing is—” Andrews started to say.

  “You!” Skidmore turned his ire toward Andrews. “I’ve a good mind to have you deported.”

  “I have dual citizenship,” he said quickly. “But the point is—”

  “The point is,” Skidmore ranted, “that I came over here to show you what I’ve been doing about your case, and you weren’t here. You weren’t here like I told you to be less than two hours ago!”

  Only then did I notice that several laptop computers were set up on the kitchen table, along with what looked like an old stereo system.