Ghosts, Monsters and Madmen

by D. Nathan Hilliard

  She could practically feel its damp presence standing right behind her.

  Choking out a cry, she twisted around to face the way she came.

  Nothing.

  For a panicked instant she couldn’t locate the body, but then spotted it leaning against the same tree as before. At this distance, she wouldn’t even have recognized it as a corpse if she hadn’t already known its nature. With its varied shades of brown, and crown of mushrooms, it appeared to be nothing more than a rotting stump next to another tree. It was only by the accident of walking almost right on top of it that she had discovered it in the first place.

  Regardless, it remained a corpse and she remained a nearby, semi-stoned college student with an inconvenient bag of weed in her car.

  “Okay,” Tamara gasped to herself, “Okay. Time to…time to go. I got the shot. It’s…It’s all good.”

  Staggering upright, she gave one final look at the wretched lump against the tree then turned back towards the front of the park. Sooner or later, some other adventuresome park explorer would stumble across the body and see that the proper authorities were notified. The faster she got out of here the better.

  Her job here was done.

  ###

  “Pauly?”

  Tamara pushed open the door of the Media Lab and stepped into its shadowy interior. She moved with the ease of familiarity through the gloomy confines of the room and seated herself at a computer terminal against the far wall. Sitting her purse on the desk beside her, she scanned the dark lab again for the reclusive assistant. The only sources of illumination were the multiple glows of other computer monitors scattered throughout the room, giving it a somewhat cave-like atmosphere.

  “Hey, Pauly? You here?”

  “Be with you in a minute!” a distant reply came back from one of the two dark rooms along the side of the lab, where people still developed old style film.

  Satisfied, and somewhat surprised at the sense of relief that came with not being alone in here, Tamara turned her attention back to the workstation in front of her. She fired up the photo editor, then fished the camera out of her purse while the program was loading. The little flash card in the camera was quickly removed and inserted into the computer with practiced ease. A few clicks of the mouse and the folder from her memory card came up, filled with thumbnail pictures from her earlier adventure.

  She skipped through the first twenty pictures with an almost dismissive impatience. They were earlier photos of limbs, birds, and an irritating squirrel who had defied every attempt on her part to catch it in an interesting pose. They were useless, and destined to be deleted. But at the moment Tamara wanted to see one particular subject.

  A second later she spotted the first thumbnail. A quick click of the mouse and the corpse once more slumped before her.

  She leaned forward, her face brightened by the blue light of the monitor, and studied the picture. The corpse, the tree, the surrounding woods…all had been captured in a strangely lush tranquility, like one would find in a Japanese garden. Even the cool humidity of the scene seemed to bleed out of the photograph and into the room. One could almost hear the occasional bird chirp, and sense the otherwise still hush of the morning.

  This is good, Tamara acknowledged with satisfaction. This is one of my best.

  This was the kind of result she got when she felt “the shot” come over her. This was why she had been willing to overlook the usual social obligation of at least calling in to the police anonymously and letting them know about the body. This was her art! And as far as the body went, somebody else would certainly stumble across it sooner or later and notify people. The guy was dead, and he wasn’t in a hurry to get anywhere.

  This was what mattered to her.

  But she faced a problem.

  How could she publish the photo without getting caught? Tamara already knew she would need to publish it anonymously, but that didn’t really bother her. She intended to set up an account on a couple of photography forums under a new name anyway…kind of reinvent herself so to speak. But due to the potential legal problems facing her over the corpse, she knew she would have to be careful. She needed some technical advice to make sure she couldn’t be traced—at least for now.

  “Pauly?” she called again, her eyes still glued to the monitor.

  “Yes?” answered a voice right behind her shoulder.

  “Gaaahhhh! Pauly! Don’t do that!”

  “I scared you?” The pale young man moved into the light of the monitor from behind her and peered at the screen. “Oh, I can see why. Where did you take that?”

  Tamara fought to catch her breath and glared at Pauly. The thin audio/video technician concentrated on the screen, oblivious to her look. Typical Pauly. She realized she was wasting her time sending any but the most blatantly obvious non-verbal cues in his direction and surrendered to stating the obvious.

  “Didn’t your mother teach you it’s not nice to sneak up on people?” she sighed.

  “No, I don’t think so,” he frowned in thought, taking the question seriously as he always did. Tamara knew that sarcasm and rhetorical questions were often lost on him, and shook her head in frustration at her own failure to remember that when dealing with him.

  Pauly suffered from Asperger’s syndrome, and had a large blind spot to social cues. This made social situations very difficult for him to understand, and resulted in him being something of a recluse. Not that he appeared to care. Pauly seemed content to live in the dim chamber that was the AV lab, and he knew more about the equipment than the professor himself. He was an expert on all things technical, even if he was hopeless when it came to people.

  Tamara had a younger brother with Asperger’s, which gave her a bit of insight and a lot of understanding when it came to dealing with him. Although a couple of her girlfriends thought he was creepy and wondered how she could work alone at the lab while he was around, she took a more tolerant, if somewhat long suffering, view toward him.

  “She should have,” Tamara groused. “You just scared the life out of me.”

  “Mmhmm,” he continued to stare at the picture. “Holy crap, are those mushrooms growing out of his back? You can’t get much deader than that.”

  Realizing that was the best she was going to get out of him in regard to scaring her, Tamara decided to change course and get to the point. That was often the best way to deal with Pauly.

  “Yeah, and that’s the problem. I took these pictures and they’re good…really good…but I didn’t report the body.”

  “Why not?”

  “Let’s just say I had reason not to want police around me at the time.”

  “Why?” Pauly frowned at her in obvious confusion, completely unable to take the hint to not pursue that line of questioning.

  She considered telling him it didn’t matter but realized that would just draw the conversation out further, and away from where she wanted it to go.

  “I had a bag of weed in the car, Pauly, not to mention I was a little stoned at the time. I was afraid of getting in trouble.”

  “Oh.”

  He seemed satisfied with that answer and turned his attention back to the screen.

  “The point is,” she reached over and caught his chin, turning his face back to her, “that I want to publish these pictures but I don’t want them to get traced back to me. I’m going to make a new account on a couple of forums under a new name, but I’m afraid the police could still trace it back to me if they wanted to find out who took the pictures. Could they?”

  Pauly froze at her touch, unused to the contact. He looked at her like a rabbit caught in a snare.

  “Could they?”

  “Yeah,” he murmured absent mindedly, “a simple IP trace would have them knocking at your door within an hour.”

  Tamara almost felt guilty about using a tactic like this on him. She knew that as a girl, and a rather attractive one at that, recruiting his help would be child’s play. Still, one did what one had to do.


  She put on her solemn, big-eyed face and gave him the full treatment.

  “That’s what I was afraid of,” she sighed with exaggerated dismay. “I don’t understand all that stuff, and I don’t want to get busted. But I really want to get these pictures out. They would be a great way for me to start a new persona online in the photography community. Is there some way to publish them without them being able to find me?”

  He stared at her without answering. Tamara briefly wondered if he had heard her, then realized that it was her touch that was distracting him.

  “Pauly?” She let go of his chin and leaned toward him, “Is there?”

  Pauly blinked then seemed to snap back to himself.

  “Sure,” he replied with brisk confidence. “Not a problem.”

  He stood abruptly and strode off into the darkness without another word.

  Tamara shook her head and watched the figure retreat into the shadows with a satisfied grin. She was used to his odd behavior and knew that he would explain whatever he had in mind when he returned. The important thing was he intended to do something to help. She also had complete confidence that whatever that something was, it would work. When it came to technical stuff, Pauly came in second to none.

  Turning her attention back to the monitor, she studied the picture some more.

  Once again, she found herself captivated by the scene. The picture almost seemed to have a life of its own, which sometimes happened when she gave into her muse and let it make her decisions and do her shooting for her. It possessed a poignant gravity, as if the corpse slumped against the tree represented some tragic archetypical statement on humanity itself. The defeated posture, the uniform brown staining, the short cape of mushrooms, and the idyllic surroundings all combined to create an air of funereal quiet in the embrace of nature.

  With a few quick clicks of the mouse, she copied the photo over to the hard drive and called up the copy in the photo editor. She studied it with quiet intensity, hunting any way she could improve it through the magic of computer enhancement. A few abortive tries at tweaking the hue and saturation of the photograph only seemed to detract from it, so she undid it all and settled for cropping the photo to better position the main subject instead. After a moment, she had the corpse a bit off to the right of center, slightly diminishing it and bringing out the forest around it more.

  The result was an enhancement of the original effect.

  “Oh yes, this is good,” Tamara whispered at the screen. She pulled a Dr. Pepper from her purse and popped the top. “This is perfect.”

  Copying more photos over to the hard drive, she tweaked and played with the rest. One photo wouldn’t do it. She wanted a set. Tamara worked fast, slipping into the same muse that had controlled her shooting earlier. Images were cropped, hues were checked, saturations were tweaked, all in the same almost unconscious mode. After a few minutes, she had a list of candidates. She finished by doing a swift perusal of the results, then winnowed the list before her down until only six final photos remained.

  These would do.

  These would do just fine.

  “I’m going to title you The Mushroom Man,” Tamara gloated at the images. “You’ll be the first masterpiece of the new online photographer, Scarlet Lark.” She felt a twinge of pride in the name for her new online persona and took a celebratory sip of her soft drink.

  “Scarlet Lark is an awesome name,” the darkness spoke behind her again.

  Soda sprayed across the computer screen.

  “Gaaahhh! Pauly! Stop that!” Tamara held one hand to her chest as she gasped for breath. “I swear, if you do that one more time you’re going to be the second body I photograph today!”

  “Oh…right. Sorry.” He sat an old, beat up laptop on the desk beside her. “Anyway, when you’re ready with your pictures just save them back to your card and we’ll take this machine down to the wifi hotspot near the cafeteria and you can create your new account and upload your pictures there.”

  “But you have to have a student account to use the wifi here,” she protested. “The police would be able to get the college to tell them whose account was used to upload the pictures!”

  “I know that,” the pale young man lectured as to a slow pupil, “which is why you will use an account from a student who left here last year.”

  “It still exists? How did you get access to that?”

  Pauly appeared as if he were going to start explaining, then looked at her and stopped.

  “It’s technical,” he offered with a limp shrug.

  Tamara considered being offended at the obvious slight to her intelligence, then remembered once again who she was dealing with.

  “Fine, Einstein,” she sighed. “Let’s just get this done. And since you’re being so cool about this, I’ll buy you a coffee and take your picture while we’re at it. But we need to hurry. I’ve got an appointment at a tanning salon in an hour and a half, and then I’ve got to get home and get ready for a movie out tonight.”

  ###

  With an exhausted sigh, Tamara closed the door to her apartment and tossed her keys on the table. Her “lair,” as she liked to think of it, probably passed for the typical college girl’s apartment if one allowed for the extra ferns and potted plants that rested on various surfaces and hung in baskets from the ceiling.

  “Pumpkin!” she called out as she flipped on the living room light. “Mommy’s home! She’s brought tacos!”

  A fat, orange cat detached himself from the second hand sofa with a sneeze and cough, then trotted over to her feet. Despite his girth, the tabby moved with an alacrity that implied he liked his current shape just fine and intended to keep it that way. He waited till precisely one second after she had seated herself on a stool at the kitchen counter before launching himself into her lap.

  “Oof! Maybe we ought to cut back on the tacos for you, you lummox. You have the worst diet of any cat I know.”

  She said this while unwrapping one of the tacos, breaking it in half, and setting it in a plate on the counter. Using one elbow to keep the cat in her lap, she retrieved a little medicine bottle from the spice rack, and pulled out a little capsule. Breaking the capsule open, she emptied the contents into the taco then released the now squirming feline.

  Pumpkin didn’t hesitate, but jumped on the counter and started wolfing down the fried treat as if starved. Tamara shook her head and grinned as even the corn shell was crunched and devoured. The vet who was treating the cat’s cough was already giving her hell about Pumpkin’s weight, but she just couldn’t bring herself to deny him.

  “Who loves you, baby,” she petted the feeding animal as he purred in happy gluttony. A glance over at the phone showed two messages flashing. “Well, let’s see who wants to talk to Mommy tonight.”

  The caller ID reported the first caller to be a Jeffrey Clark.

  “Uh oh,” she glared at the phone as she pushed the button, “Jeff, don’t you dare…”

  “Hey babe!” the voice on the speaker blasted out. “I tried to reach you earlier…”

  “Don’t do it,” she growled at the phone.

  “ …anyway, Matt and David got tickets to the Rockets game tonight and had an extra for me…”

  “Don’t you do it!”

  “…so I guess I gotta reschedule. I promise, we’ll do dinner on Monday instead. You understand, don’t you? Love ya!”

  The message ended with a click.

  “Thank you, Captain Jerkface!” Tamara erupted and came to her feet. “So the extent of my social life today is going to be spending time with a corpse and having coffee with Pauly! Thanks a lot!”

  She stalked away from the counter then wheeled and pointed at the phone.

  “And don’t get cocky, Mister! You ain’t all that! Pauly will probably get hired by IBM or somebody like that when he graduates and make six times the money you will. And come to think of it, that body smelled better than your damned socks! I can’t believe I let you talk me into doing your laundry last
weekend!”

  A confused Pumpkin gave a plaintive meow in her direction from his place on the countertop. She refocused on the cat, her finger still pointed in quivering outrage at the phone.

  “Not now, honey. Mommy’s busy losing her mind and yelling at the answering machine.”

  Satisfied, the cat went back to eating his taco while Tamara closed her eyes and willed herself to calm down. Nothing would be gained by having a meltdown here and now…she promised herself she would wait till later and make sure to have it when she had a certain Mr. Jeffrey Clark all alone with nowhere to hide.

  Having resolved that issue, she opened her eyes and returned to the phone. A glance at the small readout revealed the second caller to be one Paul Westerfield.

  Pauly.

  “Oh great!” Tamara slapped her palm to her forehead. “How did he get my number? Nevermind…stupid question…it’s technical. Now I suppose he wants a date because I bought him a coffee. I hate my life!”

  With trepidation she pushed the play button.

  “Tamara, it’s Pauly,” the flat voice of the young technician stated. “How close did you get to that body? Call me.”

  The message ended with another electronic click.

  “Oh, well that’s a relief!” She threw her hands in the air. “He just wants to talk about dead bodies. On the other hand, that means I can’t even get hit on by a nerd that hacked my phone number! I must be losing it in a big way.”

  She stabbed the machines “erase” button with her finger then, still fuming, picked up a spray bottle full of water.

  Tending her plants had a soothing effect on her, and she often did this when she needed to calm down. Starting at the fern hanging by the door, Tamara did a slow, methodical circuit of the living room, spritzing each plant. She took her time, pausing to check for dead leaves and testing the moisture of the soil in each pot. Having done that, she found that her mood had indeed improved…the fury had diminished from a knot of spitting rage to a general sense of depressed grouchiness.