by Tim McGregor
Where the fuck are you?
No name, no return number. Had to be Gantry. God only knew what voodoo he screwed around with when contacting her. Why couldn’t he just call like a normal person? Because it was his schtick, the man of mystery. The text was stale by two hours. She hit reply. Natch, as usual.
Screw him, she resolved as the old car coasted out of another town, allowing her to kick the speed up. Not knowing any number for the Hamilton Police, she started dialling emergency when the phone rang. She thumbed the call and said hello.
“Where the hell’d you go?” groaned the voice. Gantry.
“Out of town,” she gave back. “Where are you?”
“Out of town? At a time like this? Jesus, girl. I would—”
There was no time for his bullshit. “Gantry, shut up and listen to me. Mockler’s in trouble. I need you to go check on him.”
“I seem to have the wrong number,” he said.
“I’m serious. Go help him. I’m still an hour away.”
“Are you daft? You want me to stroll up to his house and ask if he needs a hand?”
“You have to. That thing is hurting him. The undertaker. Please…”
“Why do you keep calling it that, the undertaker man?”
“Because that’s what he looks like,” Billie snarled. “Just go. Now.”
“Right. I’ll get on that forthwith.”
It took all she had to keep from hurling the phone to the floor mats. “Do it! Just do this for me. Then I’ll do what you want. Whatever the hell it is. Just help him.”
“Billie, snap out of it. You should know better.”
“You’re a coward, Gantry. And a manipulator. And a fraud!”
“You’re gonna have to try harder than that to hurt my feelings, luv.” The click of a lighter sounded, the quick intake of breath. “Listen kiddo, don’t risk your neck on him. All right? See ya around.”
“Gantry, wait! I have to help him. How do I do that?”
“Bring an exorcist,” Gantry chuffed. “Bring a dozen of them.”
“Give me something. There has to be some way to stop that thing.”
Silence buzzed down the line. Billie thought he had hung up.
“Learn his name,” he said finally. Then, “Names have power.”
“Name? You said it was a shadow-demon thingie. How could it have a name?”
“Not that thing, the Undertaker. His name. Whatever he is now, he used to be human before his ghost melted into the shadow entity. Learn the Undertaker’s name. Use it against him.”
Billie took the phone from her ear and looked at it as if it held some clue before jamming it back against her ear. “How am I supposed to do that?”
“No clue, luv. But if you unearth his name, he might listen to you. That’s all I got.”
“Gantry—”
“Good luck,” he said quietly. “You’ll need it.”
The phone buzzed when he hung up. Billie stared at the phone again, willing it to ring back. Again, there was no return ID to call back to. She tossed it onto the passenger seat and stomped the gas pedal, a tiny prayer lifting off her lips for a gas station nearby.
~
Gantry hung up the phone and tossed it back to the woman he had borrowed it from. “Cheers.”
“Bad news?” asked the woman. She sat on a heavy ottoman before an enormous stone hearth, her features rippling in the light of the flames.
“Nah,” Gantry said but his eyes fell to the ornate design of the Persian rug at his feet and lingered there.
The woman tapped at her phone, her nails painted a deep red. “Billie Culpepper? Who’s he?”
“She.”
“Ah,” the woman smirked. “Friend or foe?”
“That’s still up for a debate.”
“For your sake I hope it’s a friend, John. You seem to be running out of those.” She set the phone aside, folded her hands together and looked at her guest. “So? Where were we?”
“You were taking me to the cleaners. You need to come down a little.”
She smiled. “I can’t do that, John. The price is set.”
Resting on the low table between them was a book. It was thick and it was very old, the leather cover brittle and pockmarked with tiny holes made by tiny burrowing insects. The title on the cracked spine had faded to only two words; Der Vermis.
“Well, I have a cap on spending here,” he said. “Come down and meet me. You said yourself you don’t want it in the house anymore.”
“We don’t have to do this, do we? This silly haggling?”
Gantry stretched his legs out before him, crossing his ankles like he had all the time in the world. “Course we do. Especially if you’re trying to pass that off as real.”
“Don’t insult me. We both know it’s the real thing.”
Gantry nodded at the mouldering grimoire. “Luv, if it was kosher, neither of us could stand be in the same room with it.”
The woman straightened up and looked at Gantry. She was stunning, something she knew how to use. “Then why do you want it if it’s not the real thing?”
Gantry put a hand to his ear, feeling off-balance. Normally he’d bask in the negotiation with a beautiful woman, the back and forth of easy flirtation but he felt off his game. A nagging thought needled at him. “I’m just the broker here, sweetheart. I’d sooner have nothing to do with the nasty thing.”
“You’re such a liar, Johnny.” She smiled as she said this, an old and practised routine between the two of them. She prodded the fire with the poker. “I’ll come down to four. Nothing more.” When no reply came, she turned back. “John?”
His eyes shot up, returning to the here and now. “Yeah. Sure.”
“Well that was quick,” she pouted. “Are you feeling okay?”
“No. Something’s up.”
“Oh.” She rose to her feet, pulling the black shawl snug around her. “Can I get you anything?”
“Yeah. A bowl. And some moonlight.”
The night air was a relief after the roasting heat of the drawing room. Gantry tugged at his shirt to get the material unglued from his sweaty back. The woman remained in the doorway, watching Gantry step out onto the stone veranda that overlooked the gardens. He held a clay bowl in his hand, the water spilling down the side as he went. He set it out down gently on the stone parapet and looked up at the night sky.
“Is that enough moon for what you need?” She hugged her elbows together as if cold.
A three-quarter moon shone down on them. “It’ll do.”
“Then hurry up,” she said. “It’s freezing out here.”
Gantry glanced up at her, shivering in the terrace doorway. It was a humid summer night and yet the woman in the shawl quaked as if it was midwinter. “You can wait inside if you want.”
“I want to see.”
Gantry unfolded a pearl-handled pocket knife and sliced the blade into the pad of his thumb. Blood welled up in the split and he held it over the bowl until three drops fell and bloomed in the water. He stuck the cut thumb against his lips and studied the water in the bowl.
“Well?” the shivering woman asked.
“Shite.” He took the bowl and flung the contents into the rosebushes. “I need to run.”
“What is it?”
“Trouble. Don’t ask me why I’m bothering though, because I don’t have a bloody clue.”
She withdrew inside and closed the door after him. “That doesn’t sound like you.”
“Getting soft in me old age.” He looked at his thumb, the red tracing a line over the nail. “You got a plaster?”
“No,” she said. Her eyes sparkled. She took his hand and pressed the cut to her own lips.
~
The side-view mirror swiped the hedges as she pulled into the driveway too fast. Mockler’s car was parked on the cracked pavement but the windows of the house were dark. The engine ticked as it cooled and Billie pounded up the front steps. She banged on the door, calling Mockler’s name
.
The door opened at a slight push.
“Mockler!”
Her voice rattled down the foyer. No other sound from within. She swept through the living and dining rooms, through the kitchen and then hollered up the stairs. The place was empty. She didn’t need to search the house to know he wasn’t here. She could feel his absence. She had no such sense for the girlfriend but she would have come running upon hearing someone break into her house. Where were they?
There was a sliver of relief in the fact that she didn’t sense the Undertaker anywhere. He (or it, she wasn’t sure how to render it) wasn’t here. All three of them were gone and that was not a good sign.
She turned around, her attention drawn to the sunroom off the back of the house. The improvised studio. Mockler’s girfriend was a painter, she remembered. Something about that irked her. Crossing to the entrance of the studio, she squinted in the gloomy light at the easel set up in the middle of the room. The framed canvas propped up against it, a work in progress.
She almost screamed when she saw the horrid face staring back at her.
39
THE SCREEN DOOR banged open as Billie ejected from the house into the backyard. Seeing that face again, she knew she was too late. Mockler was gone. She had failed him.
Nasty little nightmares bubbled through her mind about where he could be and what was being done to him. Stop. She got up off her knees and looked at the house. Think. Find him.
She took a breath to slow her pulse and clear her mind. Then she opened up, unfolding whatever part of her that could see the dead. Find him, she repeated to herself. There was some connection to him, one strong enough to reach her fifty miles away on the shores of Lake Erie. Surely she could pick up the scent now.
It was there but muffled, like a single voice in a crowd. A vague sense of him, like an echo. Filtering out the noise, she realized it wasn’t muffled so much as overpowered. Something much stronger and more powerful was masking it. Something that stank of rot and death and evil. The undertaker.
She could almost see the trail he had left behind, like slime left by a snail, glittering wet in the light of the partial moon. It went from the house, across the parched lawn at her feet and continued on to where the yard ended at the fence. The boards were damp with rot and three of them had been snapped and pulled away.
Ducking through, Billie followed the trail through a thicket of raspberry weeds that scratched her arms. The brambles gave away as she stepped into a vacant lot. Bordered on all sides by thick weeds, the ground inside the lot was sandy and barren, as if toxic and unable to support any vegetation. Squared up inside the sandy lot were the ruins of a house, the brick foundation of a structure now long gone. A spire of brickwork on the north side suggested the remains of a chimney.
Clambering over the brickwork, she dropped into the sandy grit of the former building. What looked at first to be a sinkhole turned out to be an entrance to whatever remained of the cellar. The trapdoor had been pulled open and, leaning in, she saw stairs going down. Dirt had been tracked into it, spilling down each step as they descended into darkness.
The smell wafting up from below was sickly. Without a doubt the shadow thing was down here but was Mockler here too? She could feel him down there in the dark, alone in the cold and damp. He was injured.
She did not want to go down there. No one would. Even the dead would balk here.
The grit spilt over the steps made them slippery and each footfall announced her descent with a loud crunch. Her heart clanged inside her chest. It was dark but when her feet hit the landing she could make out small pinpricks of light in the gloom. As her eyes adjusted, tiny candles emerged around a vast space, their light bouncing off white tiles. The walls and floor were tiled in white porcelain, along with a mounted washbasin under the high window. Brown glass bottles lined a shelf to her left, on the opposite wall was a rusting metal contraption whose purpose escaped her. In the centre of the room stood a mortuary table of cast iron, the porcelain veneer chipped and stained. Underneath it lay the hydraulic lift and the flywheel that tilted the table to drain it of fluids.
Her nickname for the shadow had been correct after all. This place was his. Everything in it pulsed with his sickening power. Whomever he had been in life, he had dealt with death and its messy aftermath.
Okay, she said, twisting up her courage. Find Mockler, get out. Simple as that.
Shadows clung to the farthest corners of the mortuary room, too deep for the ambient light to dispel. Stifling the urge to whisper his name, Billie opened herself more to let her senses grope the dark for him. She found nothing but damp and mold and a little loose dirt.
A ping rippled down her sonar, movement or life or something from the farthest span of wall. Her eyes picked out a thicker mass amid the darkness, shimmering like the surface of a lake in the night. Its span confused her, the depth. Not just one life but thousands of them and then she realized with revulsion that the mass was a swarm of flies, crawling and burrowing over each other in their stomach-churning multitudes.
Yet, underneath their hateful little lives beat the heart of another. The one she sought. Her gut flip-flopped when she understood that the flies were crawling over Mockler a thousand insects thick.
Billie ran for him, brushing the hateful things until they boiled up into the air and swarmed around her in a devilish cloud. Mockler was unconscious. His face was bruised and a split on his cheek was already festering. His hands were filthy with blood.
She called his name and smacked his face but he remained as limp as wet sand. The flies nattered her, buzzing her ear endlessly and crawling over her face.
She felt the vile things on her tongue and spat them out but more crawled in. Screaming, she dragged the man across the floor but the detective was big and she slipped and fell. Even if she got him to the stairs there was no way she could pull him up those steps.
The noxious stench grew stronger and she knew instantly what it meant. She didn’t want to look but her eyes tilted up all on their own.
The undertaker man stood behind the embalming table. Watching her. He bent down and gripped the heavy flywheel. Cranking it hard, the table tipped until it was level. The undertaker man straightened up and lifted one hand. His fingers curled as he waved her forward.
He wanted Mockler on the slab. And he wanted her to put him there.
“He doesn’t belong to you,” she said.
The undertaker glowered. His hand went up and Billie felt a push. Mockler slipped from her hands and was pulled away, sliding across the floor to the mortuary table.
Something changed. The terror in her gut switched over into rage. She roared at the thing to stop. The air crackled around her as a wave of energy or heat swept across the room and Mockler fell from whatever grip he was held in. The undertaker staggered back under the force of it.
The look of surprise did not last long. He bared his foul teeth and Billie could already hear the flies swarming around her.
“Piss off!”
The voice startled them both. When she saw Gantry at the bottom of the stairs, she wanted to cry. The cavalry had arrived.
“Enough with the Beelzebub trick, huh?” The lighter flicked and Gantry lit a cigarette and then turned to the dark mass hovering near the table. He looked annoyed. “You’re the shittiest excuse for a ghost I’ve ever seen.”
The flies roiled angrily. The look in the undertaker’s eyes flared with hatred.
Billie felt her knees give out. She had no idea what Gantry was doing or how he was doing it, she was just grateful that he was here.
“All right, Billie?” Gantry asked.
“Mockler’s hurt.”
“Pull him out of there. We’re leaving.”
Billie scuttled in, snatched the unconscious man by the wrist and dragged him away. “You have to help me get him up the stairs.”
“That big bastard?” Gantry sneered.
Something shifted behind him. A woman stepped from the shadows
with a length of wood in her hands. It came down hard on Gantry’s skull. The Englishman went down like a sack of dirt.
“Gantry!”
Christina stood over Gantry like a conquering hero, the make-shift club still in her hands. There was something wrong with her eyes.
The detective was yanked from her hands and pulled away into the darkness. Christina brought the club up high over her head with both hands, ready to bludgeon Gantry’s skull.
Billie couldn’t breathe. Caught between two evils with no lesser one to choose from, she shrieked at the woman. “Christina! Stop!”
Something rippled through the air. The strange light in the woman’s eyes dimmed. Christina blinked, as if waking, and then terror spread over her face as she looked at Billie. Her lips quivered as she mouthed silent words. Help me.
“Put the board down,” Billie pleaded. “Fight it.”
The woman was crying and the wood quivered in her hands and then it was over. The unnatural glow flared up in her eyes and Christina was gone.
Billie felt something cold on her skin. The undertaker was breathing down her neck. She lashed out at the mass of flies hovering around her but there was nothing solid to connect with, nothing to clobber.
A thin hand emerged from the swarm and reached for her, the fingers snatching at her ankle. It looked wrong. Small and bony, like the arm of a child, it groped and clawed for something to hang onto. The grime-encrusted little fingernails looked familiar.
Billie clasped the hand tight, so small in her own, and pulled and pulled harder until the flies parted and it slid free like some obscene birth. The half-boy clung to her with a desperate grip, burrowing his face into her chest. Billie kicked out, propelling both of them away from the monstrous swarm.
The undertaker gnashed his teeth, as if in physical pain. The swarm thinned, flies scattering into the damp air until they regrouped and the whole awful mass swept forward.
The half-boy quaked, clinging to her like a barnacle. He glanced back once at the thing that had trapped him, then he tucked into her cheek. He whispered into her ear that there were more of them,trapped inside.