by Tim McGregor
Her back went up, eyes scanning the corners of the room. “Is he still here?”
“He scampered. Who is he?”
“How should I know?”
“You’re the one who can chat with dead people, remember? Ask him.”
“That’s the last thing I want to do. How do I get rid of him?”
“Telling him to ‘fuck off’ might work. The trick is to say it with conviction. Sit down already.”
She took the beer he had opened for her but stayed on her feet. “I didn’t know they could hurt people.”
“Some can,” he shrugged. “They stick around long enough, they learn how to manipulate the physical world. Those are usually the nasty ones.”
Billie leaned back against the counter. Was she really discussing ghosts? With a wanted criminal in her kitchen no less? Her shoulders drooped. “I just want everything to go back to normal.”
“I always wanted to be taller.” He fished his cigarette pack from a pocket and shook one out. “But it just ain’t in the cards, is it?”
“You can’t smoke in here.”
He snapped the lighter and lit up. “The thing is, Billie, is that there’s different types of dead folks out there. Some are harmless, some are lost. But some are nasty. By the same token, there are different types of mediums too.”
Smoke billowed up toward the ceiling. Billie slid a dirty dish across the table for him to use as an ashtray. “Do I really wanna hears this?”
“You should be taking notes. Some mediums can see the harmless ones, the newly dead or the ones who got lost. The common ones, who just haven’t crossed over or buggered off or whatever the hell dead people do when they move on—”
“Move on?” she interrupted. “You mean they go to Heaven?”
“I have no idea. They just aren’t here anymore.” He flicked his ash into the dish. “Now, the mildly talented mediums can see a bit more. But the really nasty phantoms, well, you need to move up the pay grade to find a seer who can pick out those ones.”
“The job pays?”
“Don’t be cute. The point is, I think you’re one of the powerful ones. Lots of people have second sight, or whatever you call it, but they see forms and shapes. Or they just sense the dead person in the room. The rare seer? They can see them clearly. For what they are. And communicate with them.”
Billie pulled out a chair and finally sat. “And you think that’s me?”
“Bingo.”
“And what exactly am I supposed to do with this talent? Besides being scared witless half the time.”
“You talk to them. Find out what they want.” Gantry stubbed out the cigarette. “Most mediums, the good ones, learn how to utilize their talent. They know how to open themselves up to it, to the dead around them. And they learn how to shut it down. Or turn off their radar so they won’t be bothered by them.”
“You just said it’s not a lightswitch.”
“It’s not an exact science, Billie. It’s feeling and intuition, like.”
Billie ran a finger through the wet ring of condensation the cold beer can left on the table. Patience was normally a strong suit of hers. Sometimes she felt as if she’d been waiting forever for her life to start but this was not what she had in mind. Gantry’s mystery-man routine was wearing thin, his riddles and supernatural mumbo-jumbo becoming tedious.
“Then tell me how to switch off my radar or whatever it is,” she said. “I want nothing to do with this.”
He shrugged. “I don’t have a clue how that works. I’m not a medium, am I?”
“What are you, then?”
His mouth frowned in a comical way as he turned the question over. “Me, I’m more of a day-trader. Listen, I know this is hard to deal with but you can’t walk away from it now. It’s too big. It’s like that bit from the Spiderman comics, yeah? About how power comes with responsibility.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“It just means you can’t squander your talents.”
“This doesn’t sound like a talent,” she said. “More like a disability.”
“It’s all a matter of perspective, innit?”
Billie wiped the table dry with her hand, set the can down and then raised it again. The water ring returned. “I tried to get rid of one. My friend got hurt. The place almost burned down.”
“You bit off a bit more than you can chew that time.”
“What was I supposed to do? That awful thing was haunting Jen’s shop—” She cut herself short after using the word ‘haunting’. Had she bought into all this?
“That’s why you need to sort this. Get in front of it before it gets out of hand. Otherwise it’ll drive you barking mad.” He looked at his watch. “I gotta run.”
“How?”
“That part I’m a bit foggy on.” He rose and crossed to the doorway. “But a place to start would be to find out how you’ve suppressed your ability for so long. Like I said, you’ve always had it. But now it’s woken up.”
“The knock to the head,” she said quietly.
“I think it had more to do with being clinically dead for a few minutes.”
With that, he left the kitchen and made for the front door. Billie blinked for a few moments before getting up.
“What’s all this?” Gantry heldThe the manila envelope that had been slipped under her door. He held up the newspaper clippings. “Where’d you get this rubbish?”
“Somebody slid it under my door.”
“Why is this shite always so badly written?” He snorted and tossed the sheets away. “See you around.”
Billie scooped up the loose clippings. “Is this stuff true? This is why you’re wanted by the police, isn’t it?”
“There’s a grain of truth in there. The rest is bullocks.”
The fine hair on her arm crackled again. “You killed someone? In some Satanic thing?”
“I didn’t kill anyone. It was an exorcism that went bad. The woman died.”
Any patience Billie had left evaporated. Now she was just angry. “Come on. An exorcism?”
“Something took hold of that poor girl. I tried to help her.” His eyes dropped to the floor. “I failed.”
His darkening face made her pause. “So you’re not some devil-worshipping serial killer?”
“Give me some credit, Billie. I wouldn’t be caught dead with that pack of wankers.”
“Then why is detective Mockler after you?”
“What? He’s gonna believe me? He’s got copper tunnel vision.” Gantry stepped out to the corridor then stopped. “We’re becoming quite chummy with Mockler, aren’t we?”
She held the door open. “I wouldn’t say that.”
“Watch yourself there, Billie. Murder cops aren’t the most stable bunch.”
Gantry stuck another cigarette in his teeth, flashing a wide grin before he disappeared down the stairwell.
17
THE SPINE OF the binder was split from over-use, the edges frayed from familiarity. Opening it one more time would lead only to frustration but Mockler did it anyway. The typed reports flipped past, his notes cribbed into the margins on so many pages. Leafing past it all, he turned straight to the crime scene photographs. He had studied these images countless times before but their gruesome images still took him aback. The violence of it all.
The woman’s body lay on the bare floor of some squat on Bleeker Street. Her left arm was bent back so unnaturally that it appeared fake, a trick of the light or a prosthetic effect from some horror movie. The right leg was broken at the knee and angled in a way it was never meant to. He remembered having difficulty describing the position of the body in that initial report. Although the victim lay on her belly, he couldn’t state that she was face down. Like the rest of her, the poor woman’s head was all wrong. The neck had been snapped and twisted all the way around. Her face looked up to the ceiling, even though the rest of her was face down. Detective Inspector Mike Schavinno, who was primary on the investigation, shook his head at the
sight and asked Mockler to write up the description of the body for him. He didn’t have a clue how to describe what he was seeing.
The woman remained nameless, another frustrating aspect of the case. Clad in only a thin smock, there had been no identification found at the scene. No wallet or bag or any other clothes. White, five-ten with medium length dark hair, the victim’s physical details matched with no known missing persons in the Hamilton-Wentworth area. She remained nameless, which only added salt to the horror she had been subjected to. Mockler remembered a vow he had foolishly made at the time. That he would give the deceased back her identity and pluck her from the limbo of countless other Jane Does.
Turning the printed photos over revealed the victim at different angles. The close-up of the woman’s face still haunted him, the way her eyes were stretched wide in terror but her pupils were all wrong. Dull white in colour, as if all the pigment had been burned out of them. The bleached-out eyes gazed straight into the camera and Mockler couldn’t help the creeping sensation that she was looking directly at him. He flipped the photograph over.
The rest of the pictures were of the room itself. A large circle had been painted on the floor, with a five-pointed star within its circumference. A pentagram. Four of the five points of the star were capped with candles. At the fifth point, which compassed north, was a clay bowl of water. The pentagram measured fifteen feet in diameter and the dead body lay crumpled in the southeast corner of it.
The paint had also been used to splash words on three of the walls. The language of the scrawled words confounded both detectives until a professor from the university was brought in to take a look. It was Aramaic, the professor reported. A dead language not spoken since the time of the Romans. The meaning of the Aramaic continued to elude him however, as the professor could not translate the message. He said the words made no sense at all. It appeared to be a string of random words.
The fourth wall, which faced south, was plastered with pages torn from the Bible. They were all the same pages torn from different editions of the New Testament. Mark 5: 1-20. The story of Jesus encountering a lunatic in a graveyard and how Jesus casts out the demons that had driven the man insane. Forced to abandon the hapless man, the demons enter a herd of swine and the swine proceed to leap over a cliff to their deaths. Never a religious man, Mockler could make no sense of the bizarre tale or how it pertained to the victim found on the floor.
One significant article of evidence had been found on the victim herself. A name had been burned into the flesh of the woman’s back, as if singed into the skin like a cattle brand. A single word:
GANTRY
Speculation ran rampant when they uncovered that awful wound. Was the perp marking his territory? Who was Gantry? Detective Inspector Schavinno ran out the bill for overtime as he worked his unit, Mockler among them, in the search for the individual identified as Gantry.
What emerged was a vague sketch of a shadowy British national named John Gantry. Even then, the details they had were few and their sources questionable. Known psychics and mediums, the owner of an occult bookshop in north end and the head of a Satanic church based out of a Quonset hut up on the mountain. These people seemed to know Gantry more by way of reputation than actual interaction. Working from the scant details, Gantry appeared to be some kind of investigator of the paranormal. A fixer of all things supernatural. Got a haunted house? Call Gantry, he can clear it (for a fee, of course). Cursed by an enemy or rival? John Gantry can fix that too. For an extra fee, he can even redirect that curse to boomerang back to the person who issued it.
A con-man through and through, Detective Schavinno concluded. Mockler agreed. A shifty fraud willing to swindle desperate people with his voodoo schtick. With the investigation of the victim in the pentagram, he was now a murder suspect. Sightings of the suspect came in all over the city but the more man-power Schavinno threw at the search, the more elusive Gantry became. ‘Spooky’ was a term whispered in the staff kitchen. ‘Creepy shit’ could be heard in the motor pool whenever the Gantry file was discussed. Schavinno shut down the gossip and worked his unit harder and Mockler put his shoulder to the task so intensely that he didn’t make it home for days. Schavinno’s health began to fail when the search entered its fifth month.
Reaching out to British police provided a few significant details. A big red alert flared up when the Hamilton squad learned of a homicide in England with eerie similarities to their own file. A young woman murdered in the east end of London in what appeared to be some kind of devil-worship ritual. The dead body broken and bent, the pentagram with the candles. The victims were also similar in appearance. White, dark haired, twenty to thirty years of age. No tell-tale name had been burned into the victim’s flesh but the London police uncovered a much more solid article of evidence about the perpetrator of the crime. The victim had been identified as Ellen Marie Gantry. Wife of one John Herod Gantry.
The break in the case reignited the Hamilton squad but faded out as the London police force had found Gantry as slippery as they had. He appeared to have slipped off the grid sometime in the last decade. An inactive national insurance number, no driver’s license, no income reported, no bank account, no known employer. Hearsay and gossip from less than reliable sources within London’s occult community. Gantry appeared to have operated as some kind of paranormal ‘fixer’ before vanishing altogether after murdering his wife.
Ellen Gantry was as normal as houses. A brief stint at London Art College, followed by a freelance career as an illustrator. Aside from a marriage licence, there had been no legal connection to John Gantry. Even that was sketchy, as no one could figure out how someone without an actual identity had gotten married. His name was printed on the marriage certificate, that was all.
The London Police service did, however, provide one key piece of information to the Hamilton file; a photograph of John Gantry. The same photo that Mockler had hung on the evidence board. The smirking visage of a thin, rakish man who appeared to be winking at the security camera as it snapped its shutter. The photo was distributed throughout the Hamilton units and then things sort of went to hell after that. Sightings of the man popped up everywhere. A sighting on James Street, near the armoury in Hamilton. The next week, a sighting in Camden Market in London. It seemed as if the suspect was travelling constantly between Canada and the U.K. every week, which proved curious for a man without a passport. It was downright embarrassing to border security on both sides of the pond.
The sightings died down, the case grew cold. Inspector Schavinno was forcibly retired after blowing the budget on the investigation, leaving only detective Mockler to carry the ball on it. Nobody else wanted to touch the spooky case and the incoming sergeant, Thea Gibson, dampened any further investigations without new leads. Mockler rotated back into the shift, supporting the primary detectives on new case files.
Nothing happened after that, until September of 2013 when Mockler came face to smirking face with John Gantry.
Driving back to Division One after canvassing the Welland block in a stabbing incident, Mockler took a detour and drove past the abandoned tenement where the Jane Doe had been found. Something about the case was prickling his skin and without thinking about it, he steered the car back to the old building where it had all started. Intending to simply drive past it, he noticed a flicker of light in a third floor window. The shanty brick edifice had been without power for more than three years, yet a glow of light bled from the upper floor. Eyeballing the windows across the facade, he realized the light was coming from the same room where the victim had died.
Going around back, he found the plywood boarding up the rear entrance had been broken open. After calling it into Division, he slipped through the opening and crept up the stairs. Voices echoed down from above, muffled and unclear. More than one person. Coming onto the third floor landing, he could make out one voice clearly. Male, with an English accent.
He stopped and checked his gut. His hand dropped to his side to reaff
irm the firearm clipped to his belt. Most days, Mockler left it at the office. He had drawn his weapon a few times while on the job but had never discharged it while on duty. Letting off a tiny sigh of gratitude for clipping it on today, he unlatched the strap and drew it slowly from its holster. The question facing him now was whether to go in or wait for back-up.
Judging from the voices, there were at least two individuals inside the aparment. An awful stench hung in the air, one he would find difficult to describe later when typing up the incident report. The smell of something burning combined with an acrid sulpher smell and the stink of rot. When the hallway lit up with flashes of light, Mockler moved in.
Sidling up to the doorway, he quick-peeked inside to establish one individual near the window. He swung about with the weapon in both hands, barking his entry to the occupant.
“Police! Drop your weapon! Get on the ground!”
John Gantry sat on a plastic milk crate near the cracked glass of the bay window. His shirtsleeves were rolled up and his tie was tugged loose, sweat stains darkened his armpits. Both hands were dirty like he’d been digging in soil. The weapon Mockler thought he had seen in the occupant’s hand turned out to be a tall can of lager. Two empty cans lay crushed at his feet, like the man had come for a picnic in this abandoned tenement.
Gantry didn’t startle or even look surprised. He took a swig from the can. “Well if it ain’t the filth.”
Mockler repeated his demand in a loud, clear voice to drop everything and get on the ground.
“Put the piece down, yeah?” Gantry said. “I don’t want to get shot today.”
Mockler scanned the room quickly. It was empty. “Where’s the other person?”
“No one here but me, mate.” Gantry sipped his beer, heedless to the police detective’s demands.
“I heard a second voice in here. Where are they?”
Gantry didn’t answer. Mockler scanned the room again, the walls dark with graffiti but the room remained void of another person. Something crunched under his heel and he looked down to see bones on the floor. It wasn’t unusual to find animal bones inside a derelict property but these were bigger than anything left by a rat or raccoon. His first thought was that they were human remains.