“Cooper, enough games,” Cal sneered, his eyes twitching around as if he would ever be able to see me. “I don’t want no trouble, but if that’s what it’ll take, I’m game. Tell your girlfriend here where you hid the body.”
“I’m not his girlfriend,” Lee corrected him mildly. She still wasn’t taking this thing seriously. “More like his wise mentor. Very wise, old Chinese lady mentor. Unbelievably wise and always right.”
“Shadow, you sure you don’t have any poltergeist skills or other tricks?” I asked, wondering if I could knock the gun to the side or up. But Cal might fire off a bullet while I was pushing at the gun.
Shadow was still studying me. “Did you kill him? The body you hid?”
“No,” I responded through a tight jaw as I floated beside Lee, wishing I could stand in front of her and take the bullet if need be. “Not really. Kinda not. At least, I don’t think so. I can’t remember exactly. Can we please discuss this later?”
Shadow shrugged. “I’m holding you to that, janitor. Put your ghost eyes on. It’s about to get dark in here.”
Black mist pooled around him and rolled through the room like dark waves. The lights in the room flickered, dimmed and faded into the shadows and the streetlamp glow vanished as well.
“Wow, Shadow, that’s quite impressive,” Lee acknowledged. “Why can’t you do cool things like that, Cooper?”
“How many are in here?” Cal asked, his eyes wide and his gun hand shaky.
“Bah ha ha,” Aurora wailed from the corner where she crouched over in a shivering huddle of shawls.
Cal half-turned in the direction of the noise and the gun shifted towards Lee’s shoulder.
“Good enough,” I breathed and shoved at the gun.
Cal pulled the trigger. The bullet ripped through my head and something delicate exploded on the bookshelf next to Lee. As the shot echoed in the darkness, the deathmark launched itself towards us. I pushed Lee over the back of her sofa and sunk into the ground. Shadow melted away, only to reappear beside the door.
I popped back up, poltergeisted a chair and knocked it over Cal’s head. He staggered forward. Lee, who had hauled herself off the sofa and upright, sidestepped and tripped him. There was another breaking sound as a teapot on the coffee table crunched beneath Cal’s forehead.
“Great,” Lee muttered. “My favourite teapot. And I think one of the neighbours called the police.”
Sure enough, I could hear the vague and still distant wailing of a siren.
“Ladies and gentlemen, please save your commentaries for later,” Shadow murmured in his silkiest tone. “Anyone still living who would like to remain so should probably run. Anyone dead who’d like to remain uneaten should follow suit.”
Lee was already flinging open the door before Shadow had finished. She darted into the hall and ran smack into Frankenstein. I wasn’t strong enough to push the guy away. I turned back to get something to throw at him, preferably that great and impressively sized Chinese-English dictionary, only to find the deathmark blocking the entrance.
It leaped towards me and all I could think of was Timmy, our volunteer ghost guard, pushing me down into the sewer. So I sunk down to the floor below, zoomed down the hall and popped back up to Lee’s floor. I was now on the other side of Frankenstein. Shadow was nowhere to be seen. I hoped he’d melted away and not been eaten up.
“Something heavy,” I muttered, glancing around the hall of the apartment. All I could see was a box full of children’s toys and a set of small cars littering the area in front of a neighbour’s door. “Not exactly what I had in mind.” I focused on a couple of the cars and chucked them at the back of Frankenstein’s head.
A beefy hand slowly rose and rubbed the spot. He swivelled around, still rubbing his head while removing his shotgun from underneath his long coat.
“Toys?” Lee asked, her voice rising. “You’re throwing toys at him?”
“Hey, that’s all I got and I’m loosing energy,” I grumbled and winged another couple cars into the scowling face.
Lee darted around Frankenstein who was now rubbing his nose.
“Grab her,” Cal shouted as he stumbled into the hallway, picking out shards of teapot from his forehead.
Frankenstein lurched forward and started convulsing as Ghost Eater oozed through him. I hurled another three toy cars. They flew through the deathmark and bounced against Frankenstein. Cal pushed past him and chased after Lee, who had reached the stairs and was bouncing down them two at a time.
With my remaining energy, I overturned the toy box and pushed the contents up in a cloud of childhood delights, all made in China. Cal stumbled to a halt, his eyes bugging out. I flung the cloud at him, confident I had bought Lee enough time to escape. I wasn’t so confident about my own chances though. The deathmark was between the stairs and me, so I sunk through the floor, hoping to loose it again. It followed me down.
“Head for Chan’s,” I shouted at Lee as I hurtled past her.
I didn’t hear her response as I shot through the stairs, the shadowy cowboy right behind me. I didn’t stop until I was underneath the basement, surrounded by dirt molecules. I paused, waiting, completely exhausted. Nothing followed me. Either the deathmark had lost interest or it couldn’t go underground.
I knew it was a lot to hope for, but I kind of hoped that both were true.
Where to Hide a Body
“We need a car,” I announced.
We were sitting around Chan’s Chinese Chow. Well, Lee was, at least. She was perched on one of those ancient, torn up stools, waiting for her order. Shadow and I were floating next to her.
Lee kept glancing towards the door.
“We weren’t followed,” Shadow reassured her for the umpteenth time. He was pretending to lean against the counter, looking all suave and cool, but his eyes were watching every movement of every shadow and man. It had been a close call with the cowboy deathmark, even for him.
Lee shivered and talked into the menu. “I don’t have a car, Axe. And I doubt my neighbour will lend me hers when I can’t even drive.”
“I can drive,” I said hopefully.
Shadow chuckled while Lee gave me a ‘yeah, right, whatever’ look. Still holding the menu in front of her face, she reminded me of two important facts. “You don’t have a driver’s licence. And you’re dead. Dead can’t drive.”
I gave her a watered down version of my Popeye glare. “That’s kinda prejudiced, don’t you think? Plus I drove before, and I didn’t have a licence then.”
“You were alive then and I didn’t know you were illegally driving,” she retorted. “And yes, I am highly prejudiced against ghost drivers.”
“And,” Shadow continued with a smirk, “if tossing toy cars and pillows around tires you out, just think about operating a car.” He leaned closer to me. “But before we get to that, what’s this about a body you hid?”
Lee swivelled to face me and raised her eyebrows in agreement. Why is it that my two best and only friends have to be so annoyingly persistent and perceptive? I mulled over what I could tell them.
Shadow smiled, like he was either reading my mind or contemplating feeding me to a deathmark. Yeah, his smiles are that scary. “Axe Cooper, if you’re going to be truthful, you shouldn’t need to think about what to say. And if you’re going to lie, you’ll need a lot more time to come up with something plausible.”
“In other words,” Lee mumbled at the grease-splattered counter, “just tell us the truth.”
I rubbed my chin, feeling the permanent two-day old stubble and the crooked scar, a scar that resembled my life in so many ways. “It’s why I had to leave in the first place.”
“Cooper,” Lee whispered into a napkin. “I think you were imagining a conversation and all we heard was the end of it.”
“Leaving Calgary and everything,” I explained. “I had to escape to Vancouver because I helped out a friend.”
“By killing someone?” Shadow asked hopefully, his eyes spa
rkling with anticipation.
“You sound like that’s a good thing,” I muttered.
“You have to admit that a history like that would make you considerably more interesting than the typical janitor,” Shadow justified his interest and then held up his hands. “Not that there’s anything wrong with being a janitor. Someone has to clean the toilets.”
Lee laughed and one of the customers glanced at her, probably wondering what could possibly be amusing about a Chinese menu.
“So I’d be a lot cooler if I was a killer, eh?” I shook my head at Shadow’s expression. “Remind me why we’re friends?”
Shadow grinned, which is even scarier than his smile. “Because I’m cool and I don’t mind hanging out with dead janitors who hide bodies. Now out with the goods: did you or did you not murder someone and then have to hide the body?”
I hesitated. Why was the truth so difficult? Maybe because I couldn’t remember it all. “Not exactly.”
“You didn’t exactly kill someone or you didn’t exactly hide the body?” Shadow leaned back, clearly enjoying himself.
“A friend and I…”
“Wait,” Shadow interrupted. “You had a friend? Apart from us?”
I scowled, but Lee answered. “Believe it or not, our anti-social janitor used to have many friends in his pre-janitorial life.”
“So a friend and I were attacked, we were both injured.” My hand rose up towards my chin without me thinking about it. I lowered it, but Shadow caught the movement. “In the scuffle, our attacker fell on an axe.”
“Fell on an axe?” Shadow repeated, like I’d just announced I’d ridden to the moon in a hot air balloon.
“Yeah. He fell on an axe,” I said, emphasising the falling part. “And things being what they were, we couldn’t go to the police, so I offered to help my friend hide the body. One thing led to another, and I had to disappear for a while, like forever.”
“Things being what they were…” Shadow murmured, studying me. “So where is it?”
“In the Bow Valley Wildland, just off Highway #1 between Kananaskis and Canmore. Near a place called Dead Man’s Flats.”
“Was that English?” Lee asked. “It sounded alienish.”
“And what planet is that on?” Shadow added.
I smiled, sort of. Even to me, it seemed like a far away place. If only. “It’s about an hour or so outside of Calgary. In the foothills of the Rockies, I guess you could say.”
“Dead Man’s Flats,” Shadow mused, a wistful smile lightening his features. “Sounds promising. But why were you there in the first place?”
See, this is where truth gets complicated. I’d answered one question pretty honestly, which led to the next question. And if I answered that, I’d eventually be spilling the beans on everything prior to collapsing at Lee’s doorstep three years ago. And I wasn’t so eager to spill a lot of beans, or anything else.
Yup, complicated and uncomfortable.
“We were visiting someone there,” I finally said.
Sort of true.
“In Canmore?” Lee raised her eyebrows and her voice. “You knew someone in an unheard of town in the Rockies and you decided to go visit them?”
A customer slid away, glancing at Lee with a worried frown.
“Like you said, I used to have friends,” I defended myself.
“So that’s why you need the car? That’s what you want to do?” Shadow interrupted. “Drive out there? If so, we may have to steal a car. And then what? Dig up a body?”
I shrugged. “Pretty much. Something about that body has Cal all spooked. Can’t imagine what. It was so long ago. The thing’s just bones and dust by now.”
“So why not just tell him where the body is?” Lee whispered. The same customer choked slightly and shifted further down the counter. I wondered when he’d finally pull out a cell phone and dial up the police.
“Tell Cal so he can dig up the body? And spoil all the fun?” Shadow asked, straightening up and glaring down at Lee. “What kind of a person are you?”
“Someone who doesn’t want to steal cars and dig up bodies!” she huffed.
The customer shot out of the door without his takeout, while several others glanced around. Lee stood and smiled blandly, as if it was perfectly normal to talk to invisible friends about stealing cars and digging up bodies. She wasn’t the only one who sighed with relief when Chan Junior dropped her bag of takeout on the counter.
He briefly interrupted his on-going shouting match / really loud conversation with the kitchen staff to tell her, “Eh. Lay-dee. You or-daa read-dee.”
“Super,” Lee said through a tight smile, grabbed the bag and marched out.
“You really shouldn’t talk out loud to yourself,” Shadow advised.
“You really shouldn’t talk at all,” Lee muttered back.
“So back to the main topic,” I said.
“Just tell Cal where the body is,” Lee said once we had cleared a group of rowdy students hanging out on the corner.
I shook my head, my jaw tightening up. “Don’t think so. I don’t know why he wants it, but I wanna know first before I hand that over.”
“Exactly. Plus you know too much,” Shadow added, nodding at Lee.
“There’s that too,” I agreed.
“And I haven’t seen a body exhumed in a long time,” Shadow continued. “Ah, the good old days.”
“I’m not digging,” Lee said with absolute finality. “Let’s be very clear about that.”
Shadow grinned. “But that’s the best part.”
Lee shook her head. “You are one sick ghoul.”
The grin widened. “Why, thank you! It’s all fun and games, as long as no one dies, of course.” He paused and chuckled. “Oops. That could be a problem.”
“So about that car,” I said.
Naming a Place
So let me make a quick diversion here. How does a dot on the map get a grand name like ‘Dead Man’s Flats’?
Turns out, I wasn’t the first person to dump a body there. I’m not famous, or infamous, enough for a place to be named after me or after anything I might have done. Even in a nowhere place like Dead Man’s Flats. No, someone else gets to claim that feather for his cap.
François Marret moved to a speck on the map on the east side of the Rockies mountain range in 1901. That speck was (and still is) a small town called Canmore. He’d gone to the middle of nowhere to work for his brother, Jean, on a dairy farm located along the flats.
On 12 May 1904, François killed his brother.
François Marret’s motive was simple enough: his brother had not paid him for all his hard work. Not to mention that his dead parents had ordered him to do it. And if those reasons weren’t enough, François further testified to the court, “I wanted to kill my brother because Jean tried to kill me.”
As far as I’m concerned, any of those reasons are reasonable enough, especially the one about getting orders from the dead.
Just in case his brother had any ideas about haunting him after being murdered, François threw the body into the river to prevent Jean’s ghost from tracking him down.
Surprisingly, the jury thought François was insane and sent him to a mental asylum. Go figure. The guy obviously didn’t have a great lawyer.
And about a century later, history repeated itself, in a manner of speaking (minus the lousy lawyer and the insane asylum). Except this time around, there was no trial and no one claimed to have received orders from dead people. But there was a murder, a body and, eventually, there was a ghost.
That ghost would be me: Axe Cooper.
A Safe Place, Sort of
“Can’t we just take a bus?” Lee demanded as we watched the building for signs of non-ghostly life. So far, the area looked as dead as it looked derelict.
I shook my head. “Where we need to go, we need a car. And if we bus to Canmore, we’re going to have to hire a car to get to the grave, which we can’t do because you don’t have a license. Or we h
ave to hire a taxi, and he’d see what we’re up to. Or steal a car there, and the options will be a lot fewer.”
“And why are we here?” Shadow asked, keeping to the shadows of the alley we were lurking in. There’s no other word for it: we were indeed lurking.
“We’re going to need Faye,” I explained.
“I was afraid you’d say that,” Shadow said mournfully.
“You, afraid?” Lee scoffed.
He straightened up. “In a figurative manner of speaking, my dear.”
“I think it’s clear,” I whispered, studying the far too numerous unlit areas of the deserted street, areas that would be perfect hiding places for a hungry deathmark.
“Great,” Shadows whispered back. “Why are we whispering then?”
My only response was to exit the alley to cross the street. It wasn’t raining, but there was a cold, damp wind blowing litter about. I assume it was cold: Lee pulled her raincoat tight around her and hid her face behind the upturned collar. One thin hand clutched a shovel to her side, as if that could make her feel warmer or safer.
“Are you very sure we’re alone out here?” she whispered, shivering. She was scratching her left elbow.
“Nope,” I said, “but as sure as I can tell. I don’t hear or see anyone. Do you?”
I kept an eye on her elbow. Lee’s left elbow always itches when she’s being watched. Always. It’s like a built-in, stalker detection system. I’d tested it out and every time, she’d catch me watching.
Okay, that sounds kinda bad.
Moving right along, then…
She shook her head, still scratching her elbow. “It just feels like we’re being watched.”
“Feels like?” Shadow smirked. “Lee, I’m disappointed in you. I thought you were fearless.”
“You’re confusing fear with feelings, my shadowy friend,” Lee said, her eyes shifting to a pile of debris near the entrance of the crumbling building.
We were climbing up the few stairs to the doorway when the deathmark attacked. It leaped out from behind the pile of rubble and trash, arms extended towards one of us. I couldn’t tell who. Before the screech that was forming in my throat managed to bolt out of my mouth and humiliate me, Lee reacted. She jumped in front of the deathmark in a swish of navy blue, waving her shovel at it like a sword.
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