Welcome to the Spookshow: (Book 2)

by Tim McGregor

  “Find anything?” she asked when he returned to the kitchen.

  He shook his head. “No.”

  “Maybe a raccoon got inside,” she suggested. “Or a squirrel.”

  “Maybe.” He sounded unconvinced. His eyes darted back to her bag on the counter.

  Billie crossed to the island and zipped up the bag. “I shouldn’t have just walked into your house like that.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” He crossed to the back window and peered out at the backyard.

  She hated herself for lying and hated how easily they flowed out of her. They always had though, to cover up her odd behaviour or her foggy spells. What else could she do? Would he believe her if she told him the truth?

  The fine hair on her arm prickled and when she looked down, there was a fly. Another one of the degenerate insects touching her. She recoiled and flung it away. The pest buzzed around the room and Mockler took a swipe at it.

  “These damn flies.” He rolled up a newspaper to swat at it. “I don’t know where they all come from.”

  “I hate flies,” she said.

  The blue-bottle landed on the edge of the table, swiping its forelegs over its alien eyes. Mockler snuck up on it. “Same here. Sometimes I’ll find a hundred of them buzzing against the window pane. It’s disgusting.” He smacked it but the fly escaped with that preternatural sense they had. Mockler frowned. “I looked under the porch, thinking something had crawled under there and died.”

  “And?”

  He shrugged. “Nothing. I can’t figure out why they keep coming in.”

  “What if it’s something else. Like a toxic house thing. It happens with old houses.”

  Mockler sighed, as if he’d thought the same thing before. “I really don’t want to start tearing into the walls. God knows what I’ll find.”

  “Maybe stay away for a while. Live somewhere else until it goes away.”

  He looked at her. “Isn’t that the advice I gave you?”

  “What’s good for the goose.” She hoisted the bag onto her shoulder. “I’ll get out of your hair. Sorry about all this.”

  He followed her out and stood on the stoop while she climbed back onto her bike. “I still think you ought to go stay at your aunt’s for a while.”

  “I’m thinking about it.” She backtracked the pedal to kick off. All she had to do was coast away but she looked back at Mockler. It was killing her that she couldn’t warn him about the danger. For a second time, her attempt at helping someone had blown up in her face. “See ya later, detective.”

  “Hang on,” he said, coming down the steps. “What was it you wanted to see me about?”

  She shrugged and then smiled. “I don’t remember now.” Billie waved and pushed off. At the periphery of her sight, something had moved in the second story window but she didn’t look back to see what it was. The last thing she wanted to see was that obscene face.

  Detective Mockler waved even though the girl was out of sight and then went back inside. He had been three blocks away doing a follow-up interview with a witness and decided to stop home to make a quick sandwich before heading back to precinct. Checking the door knob and the lock again, he found nothing amiss and shrugged it off.

  He took out last night’s chicken and a head of lettuce from the fridge and plunked them onto the counter when he noticed that Billie Culpepper had forgotten something. Turning the brass crucifix around in his hand, he examined it from different angles before sliding it onto the top of the refrigerator so he wouldn’t have to look at the creepy thing.

  26

  “WHERE IS IT coming from?”

  “I don’t know,” Mockler said. The same answer to the same question inside the last ten minutes.

  Christina folded her arms, her shoulders squared stiff. “Well it has to be coming from somewhere.”

  The smell had come back during dinner, the same noxious odour that had tormented them since the winter of last year. Never consistent, never localized anywhere, the smell would waft up in one room then appear in another. A poisonous rank of sewer gas and sulphur and something left to rot, the smell would rise one day then disappear only to come back a few days later. They chased it like fools, passing from room to room, sniffing the air like bloodhounds trying to locate its source.

  Mockler banged his skull off the frame as he crawled out from under the sink. The smell was strongest in the kitchen this time and he looked there, thinking there was a crack in the drain pipe. No crack, no leak. Rubbing the throbbing spot on the back of his head, he said “Nothing down here.”

  “I can still smell it,” Christina said. Her jaw was set, one hand over her nose. “I can’t live like this anymore.”

  “It’s just a bad smell.” He took a breath. Her knack for blowing small things into melodrama infuriated him. He needed to remind himself to brush it off.

  “Don’t dismiss everything. God, I can’t even think when it gets like this.”

  His spine groaned as he got to his feet. “Where’s it coming from now?”

  Christina tested the air and then pointed to the basement door. “It’s over there again.”

  It was like a bad game of Marco Polo, the smell popping up in different places while they chased after it with their hands outstretched and groping. He opened the basement door and pounded down the wooden stairs, taking his frustration out on each worn step. Breathing in the foul air, he stumbled around nose first, trying to track it down. It made him lightheaded it was so noxious.

  “Check the stack again.” Christina sat halfway down the steps, covering her nose. “Maybe you missed something.”

  Mockler crossed to the unfinished part of the cellar where the furnace and water heater stood draped in cobwebs. The spiders had a field day down here, their webs constantly dappled with dead flies. The fly problem, he knew, was tied to the mystery smell that plagued them. If he could fix the smell, the flies would go away.

  “There’s nothing here,” he said, shining the flashlight up and down the thick pipe.

  “You’re useless. My father could fix anything.”

  “Bully for him,” he shot back. This particular needling made him bristle. The comparison, followed quickly with always coming up short against whomever the comparison was made against. A nasty fight was building up and if he wasn’t careful, it would get ugly. But he wasn’t in a careful mood and the truth of the matter was that he almost wanted the fight.

  “I don’t smell it anymore.” He crossed back into the centre of the room and clicked off the flashlight. The smell had moved on again, waiting to poison them in some other part of the house.

  Christina rubbed the bridge of her nose. “I can’t live in this house anymore. I never felt right about it in the first place.”

  She was right but he held his tongue. He was the one who had wanted the house more, its old construction and wonky charm appealing to something deep inside him. And it had been affordable. Christina was the one who thought they were taking on too much, moving too fast. What did either of them know about owning a home? It was only later that he realized she had meant that they were moving too fast as a couple. Unprepared to take on the commitment of living together, let alone sharing the burden of owning a house. He had pushed her into it, dismissing her doubts as groundless jitters and cold feet.

  He followed her back upstairs. Their uneaten dinner remained on the table where they had abandoned it after the stink turned on them. The fish had been overcooked and the vegetables mushy but he had said nothing, grateful that the meal had simply been finished. Now it just taunted him, his stomach turning oily from the stench in the house.

  There was a snap and when he turned, he saw her pop something into her mouth which she chased down with wine. The prescription bottle was crammed back into her bag before he could see what it was. He said nothing, too tired and too irked to raise that particular twist in their life. Christina had a soft spot for self-medicating. The warning signs were everywhere but, like enabling spouses the world
over, he waited for her to somehow pull herself out of this ‘bad spell’.

  “I’m going to take a shower,” she said, taking the wine with her.

  He looked at the uncleared table and the disaster in the kitchen. “Sure. You do that. This mess will just clean itself, I suppose.”

  “Don’t keep score, Ray. It’s petty.”

  He cleared the table, pushing down the embers flaring up in his chest as he listened to the steps creak under her feet. He hated when he groused like that, petty and whining in his own ears. It just came out so easily, this snipping back and forth. Shot fired, shot returned. This was how they communicated now, this sniping across the bow. It was that or him talking her down from the ledge of her depressive turns.

  How had it come to this? By degrees, the decay of their communication like a piece of space junk gradually falling to earth. Slowly and without notice, until it was too late and then everything was burning white hot as it all crashed back to earth—

  The scream from upstairs cut his thoughts short. Blood-curdling and urgent. He bolted for the stairwell, bounding up two at a time. Christina straddled the doorway of their bedroom and the hall, pointing at something inside the room.

  “What the hell is that?” she bellowed. “Did you do that?”

  Mockler skidded to a stop. Their bedroom looked untouched save for one small detail on the wall above their bed. A cross hung there from a nail, suspended upside down.

  “Is that your idea of a joke?” She shoved a palm against his chest. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  He blinked as if his eyes were playing tricks on him. It was the crucifix Billie had left behind. How the hell had it gotten up here?

  “Is this some comment on us?” Christina fumed. “Or me? Ha ha, Christina’s the devil? Very funny.”

  He crossed to the bed and pulled the brass object down from the wall. He turned it over in his hand, looking for something that would explain its strange appearance. “Christina, I didn’t put this here.”

  “Please, the joke’s over.” She took the object from him. “If you didn’t do it, then who did? Where did it come from?”

  That question he could answer but he balked. Explaining Billie Culpepper’s presence in the house might seem odd, especially after this. “I don’t know where it came from.”

  She folded her arms. “So what? Someone broke in, hung this up here in our bedroom and snuck out? Didn’t touch anything else?”

  “I don’t know.” He thought of all the times he’d heard that answer from suspects, shrugging off serious allegations with the flimsiest of excuses. I dunno. A child dodging an interrogation from a parent.

  She stomped into the bathroom and closed the door, her voice carrying from the other side. “Then figure it out, detective.”

  The crucifix was tossed into the trunk of his car, rattling against a spare flashlight and coil of Bungee cords. At least it was out of the house. Mockler closed the trunk and went back inside to deal with the kitchen. Christina came down later, her wet hair dampening the collar of her bathrobe. Retrieving the bottle of red, she retired to her studio that overlooked the backyard. A sunroom they had refitted into a space for her to continue painting.

  Their exchange was kept short but civil. No mention of the inverted cross found over their bed. Christina said she wanted to work the rest of the night and told him not to wait up. The kiss goodnight was curt and perfunctory. A formality.

  The wine, an almost full bottle of Shiraz that he knew would be gone by morning, bothered him but her return to the studio was hopeful. Christina was a talented painter who, like most artistic people, didn’t have enough time in the day to devote to their work. But the work had suffered as Christina’s depression took hold. She shunned the studio, preferring to spend her nights zonked before the television or out with girlfriends. She said she couldn’t paint when she felt so lousy and for a while, Mockler thought she would never go back to it. So, despite the row they’d had, her desire to work was a good sign. A small step in her path out of the black fog that had taken hold of her.

  Fetching a beer from the refrigerator and his book from the living room, he retreated to the front porch. The wicker bench creaked under his weight and he propped his heels onto the railing. Moths fluttered around the yellow porch light but thankfully no flies appeared. Ten minutes in, he yawned and closed the book. He looked at the cover. The Sun Also Rises. He’d been reading it for weeks, part of his ongoing effort to become well-read but the truth was that fiction bored him. He struggled to simply get through a book, let alone understand it. Hemingway seemed like a good fit, something he could sink his teeth into but even this he found a chore. The writing was simple and direct but the story seemed to be going nowhere. Endless rounds of drinks in little cafes, fishing trips, dance halls. Was there some hidden meaning here that went straight over his head? Settling the book on the bench beside him, he leaned back and listened to the crickets in the yard.

  He turned off the porch light after the second beer and locked the door. The back studio was dark, Christina having gone to bed. Stepping inside the sunroom, he flicked on the light. Christina hated showing work in progress but he was curious to what she was up to. Her big easel stood dead centre in the room, a cloth draped carefully over the frame to cover it without letting the fabric touch the paint. He lifted up one corner of the coverlet.

  The canvas was blank. Not a drop of pigment nor thin sketch lines from a pencil. Nothing.

  Mockler blinked at it, wondering what it meant. What had she been doing in here all night? Letting the cover drop, he scanned the room. A paint-spattered table to his left, her materials neatly arranged and ready to use. A bookshelf on the opposite side held oversize art books, a stereo and jars of gesso and linseed oil. Wooden frames were stacked under the windows, ready to be fitted with canvas. Everything looked the same. Untouched.

  The sketchpad. The big one Christina used to rough out her ideas before opening any paint, it sat on the wooden chair, the only thing out of place. He picked it up and flipped the cover over. A gruesome face stared back at him. Hollowed out eyes and a yawning mouth, it looked like something from a nightmare. Even more unsettling were the insects dribbling from the open mouth. Flies, a black swarm of them, crawling over the subject’s features.

  He turned the page over. The same horrid face appeared, with only a slight variation in the rendering. He flipped this paper over the spiral ring only to find the same awful image on the next page. And the one after that and the one after that. A dozen pages filled with the same gruesome face. On the thirteenth page, there was no drawing but words scratched hard into the paper.

  Woe to the women who stitch magic bands on all wrists

  Mockler folded the cover back and threw the sketchpad back onto the chair where it slid off the seat and flopped to the floor like a dead bird.

  27

  HALF-BOY HAD found a way inside. Scratching at the salt barrier until his hands were burnt black, he cleared away enough of the granules to drag his carcass over the threshold and now he was inside the apartment. Knocking over dishes and rattling cupboards, scurrying from sight whenever Billie looked his way. She no longer cared.

  The television flickered silently, tuned to some claptrap with the volume muted. Billie hadn’t moved from the couch in hours, staring mindlessly at the screen while the legless ghost scampered through the squalor of her flat. Something in the bathroom clattered to the floor and then a sharp knock issued from the bedroom. Billie remained numb to it, reaching for the wine glass to numb herself further.

  Roomies, she concluded. That’s what they would be now; she and the creepy boy without legs. Sharing the cramped apartment. Her new boyfriend. Oh don’t mind him, she could tell her friends when they came over. Her new man prefers to scuttle around in the dark and drip blood everywhere. It’s his thing.

  It’s what she deserved for having such crazy thoughts about Mockler. He’s engaged. Verboten, off limits. She wasn’t that kind of person. S
he simply wanted to help him but that, like so many things she’d attempted, backfired spectacularly. Now he probably thinks she’s crazy. Her help was proving to be hazardous to others. First Jen and now the detective. Why bother?

  A dish clattered to the floor and something dark shuffled near the doorway. Crab-boy dragged himself out into the open in his peculiar legless trot and squatted there, looking at her.

  “Go away,” she said.

  He scuttled in closer, watching her with his dark little eyes, the eyes of a timid woodmouse.

  Billie ignored him. She was getting good at ignoring things, people especially. The bar had phoned twice, asking if she was coming into work. Her friends had texted her, asking where she was and if she was all right. She ignored them all. Everything was fine here at Fortress Culpepper. She was keeping herself prisoner inside the tower, a Rapunzel without the locks.

  The half-boy slithered forward, pulling himself along on his hands. He rapped his knuckles on the floor, two sharp knocks to get her attention.

  She refused to look at him. “What do you want from me?”

  His arm came up and he pointed at the door.

  A sharp thud against the front door ejected Billie from the sofa, leaving her stomach behind. The half-boy scurried away and the knocking on the door became urgent. Ghosts don’t knock, people do. But who at this hour?

  Tiptoeing to the entrance, she hoped whoever it was would give up and go away. The peep hole revealed her friends, refracted in its fish-eye optics.

  “Open up, Billie” Tammy demanded, prominent in the range of vision. “I can see your shadow under the door.”

  Relief blew through her lungs at the sight of familiar faces but it was tainted with apprehension. Billie turned back the bolt and let her visitors inside. “What are you guys doing here?”

  “Oh we just thought we’d swing by to see if your cat was eating your mummified corpse,” Tammy huffed, barging her way in. “No biggie.”