Last Rite (Maggie Devereaux Book 3)

by Stephen Penner

  Forensic Investigator Emma Valentine rested her chin on her fist. “Unless,” she continued, “he had some sort of degenerative disease or something.”

  “Nice to see you, Emma,” Murdock greeted the new arrival. “I’m unaware of the man’s medical history yet.”

  “No need for it,” Valentine said with a crooked smile. She pushed up her sleeve and pulled on a thick, blue latex glove. “I’ve got a pretty specific hunch.”

  “About what?” Tomkins asked.

  “His legs are too long,” Valentine replied, not obviously on point. “And so are his arms.”

  “For what?” Benson asked.

  “For his torso,” Valentine answered. “Which means, either, he had some disease, or…”

  She knelt down and braced herself against the side of the bathtub. Then she slid her gloved hand under the grisly remains. She probed under the body, animating it into a marionette-like dance. After a moment, she extracted her glove—its blue well hidden by the blackish blood hanging from it in half-coagulated strands.

  “Nope, I was right,” she announced.

  “About what?” Benson asked, scanning the body visually but declining to replicate Valentine’s examination.

  “It’s gone,” Valentine said.

  “What is?” Benson asked.

  “His spine,” Valentine answered. “That’s why his ribs are resting on his pelvis. The autopsy will confirm it, but whoever did this, for whatever reason, they removed all of his lumbar vertebrae.”

  Benson nodded. “We’ll need to figure out that reason then. And I’d wager it’s the same reason they set a stone across his eyes.”

  Valentine leaned over and stared down at the bloody rock. After a moment, she stood up straight and said, “Well, now, that’s just crazy.”

  *

  “I must be going crazy,” Maggie whispered. “The stone. The same type of stone. It’s happening again.”

  She stared at the photo for several more moments, then looked up and around at the Scottish capital. A lone, straggling police car made its hurried way toward her hotel room, not bothering with lights any more. She slipped her phone away and considered her situation.

  “Why am I in Edinburgh?” she asked herself.

  Then another question. “Why was Sinclair here?”

  More thought, then, “Who was that dead guy in the bathtub?”

  And finally, as she began fiddling with the necklace she always wore around her neck, only to result in her hand tracing the empty chain frantically and her heart dropping at the thought of the police scouring the murder scene in the hotel room she’d just vacated:

  “Where’s my pendant?”

  3. Terror on the Highland Express

  There was no express train from Edinburgh to Aberdeen. Maggie knew that spelled trouble. If it had been a longer trip, she could have rented a sleeping car and gotten a good night’s rest. If it had been a high-speed train, the trip would have been about an hour and she could have forced herself to stay awake. But a three hour train ride, rolling lazily through the Scottish hills? She knew there was no way she would be able to stay awake.

  She was exhausted, although she didn’t know why. She had awakened in a strange room from a dreamless sleep. She was so curious about the waking up in a strange room part, she forgot to be grateful for the dreamless part.

  She was about to remember.

  “Tickets, please.” The conductor slid open the door to her compartment. There were no other passengers with her. She handed her ticket to the man as the train began pulling away from the station.

  He punched her ticket and handed it back to her. “Enjoy your trip.”

  “Thanks,” Maggie replied as she stuffed the ticket back into her backpack. She leaned her head against the wall to look out the window. “I will.”

  But she was wrong.

  The sky was a mottled mosaic of gray, its swirling smears of slate and ash filtering the sunlight into a twilight glow. The blotchy patches high above melted into steaks of silver and charcoal that poured down to a circle of dead treetops, their black braches reaching for the half-light with gnarled fingers. Within the circle of trees was a concentric ring of weathered gravestones, the remains of the ruined cemetery, in the middle of which stood a bewildered and befuddled Maggie.

  She turned slowly around, appraising and counting the headstones. Thirteen. Each one bleached white and facing the center of the circle. Facing her.

  She walked forward to the oldest-looking grave marker. The whitest, thinnest, most worn. A flat, smooth testament to a life lost to the past.

  The words carved into the stone were too worn away. She couldn’t read the name. She reached out to feel where the words once were. Where they still were—just barely. But her fingertips were a poor substitute for her eyes and she couldn’t decipher the shallow grooves by touch alone.

  She looked down at the journal in her left hand. She opened it. It was blank. She tore out the first page and laid it atop the remnants of the letters on the gravestone. Using the pencil in her right hand, she made a rubbing of the inscription. The nearly forgotten name slowly materialized onto the torn page from Maggie’s book.

  B R I D G E T

  “Bridget?” Maggie asked aloud.

  In response, a voice drifted across the wind, “Don’t you remember?”

  She spun around. But there was no one there. She was alone.

  She looked down again at the sheet of paper in her hand. The white block letters within gray pencil lead had been replaced by black ink, written in a strong and foreign hand:

  Brìghde

  Maggie stared at the name for several moments. A chill swelled through the air. She turned her attention to the next headstone.

  Again it was too weathered to read. Again she traced her fingers over the letters. This time she recognized the familiar letters:

  M A R G A R E T

  She stood up and noticed for the first time that a waist-high iron fence surrounded this grave, separating it from the others.

  “Why is this here?” she asked.

  The cold air answered, “Don’t you remember?”

  The iron gate at the foot of the grave swung in the growing wind. It clanked arhythmically against the fence. Maggie stepped out and proceeded to the next grave.

  She circumnavigated the graveyard, examining each headstone. Each time she was able to discern a name. Each time she failed to recognize it. Each time, the wind asked her, “Don’t you remember?”

  The sky was growing darker, the day colder. A light rain began to fall. Not enough to take shelter from, but it clung to her cheeks as she reached the eleventh gravestone.

  This one was different. Not bleached into colorlessness, not completely anyway. It held a golden hue, with faint purple veins spreading vibrantly through the stone. When she touched it, the stone held warmth. The name was clear as day, its golden paint still visible inside the chiseled letters:

  K A T E

  She stared at the name. She knew she knew. Or at least, she knew she should know. But she couldn’t find a candle to light the memory.

  The voice was equally familiar. It came not from the air itself, but from directly behind her, as if the woman were standing not a foot away. And it was tinged with sadness. “Don’t you remember?” she asked.

  Maggie turned, but there was no one there. She turned back and stared at the gravestone. Like the others, she didn’t remember. Unlike the others, it filled her with shame.

  Tears spilling from silent eyes, she stepped to the next headstone.

  E L L E N

  The tears were joined by a muffled sob and Maggie dropped to her knees before the cold stone. She waited for the question, but it never came. There was no point to it. Maggie knew the name, but didn’t remember the person. She had been too young to remember.

  The rain trickled down her neck as she kneeled, head bowed, before her mother’s grave. The wind blew her damp hair against her face. The chill was seeping into her bon
es. She pushed up off the muddy ground and stepped to the next grave.

  The last grave.

  Her grave.

  M A G G I E

  Her name was clear, even through the growing gloom She stepped forward, unbelieving, to feel the letters, as if the very vibrancy of her touch might wash them away. But before her fingers could reach the stone, the ground began to loosen and give way beneath her feet. She scrambled backward, but the earth caved in and she had to leap to the side to avoid being drawn into the open grave that appeared before her when the cloud of dust and dirt settled.

  Maggie kept her feet firmly atop Brìghde Innes’ grave and craned her neck to peer into her own. It was deep and dark and exactly her size. She looked again at the head stone.

  M A G G I E

  “But I’m not dead,” she protested.

  This time, the response came not over the air, but through the ground, gravelly and dark. A skeletal hand shot up through the soil beneath her feet and seized her ankle.

  “DON’T… YOU… REMEMBER?!”

  Panicked, Maggie wrenched her leg away and stumbled toward the center of the circle as the full corpse—rotten and mummified—pushed itself out of the grave. Maggie watched in growing horror as body after body clawed its way out of grave after grave.

  She retreated slowly from the advancing circle of the reanimated corpses of her ancestors. Unsure where to run, she found small hope when she bumped into the large tree which suddenly stood in the middle of the grave circle.

  She climbed.

  The bark was cold and slimy. Her feet slipped against the knotted trunk as she reached for the lowest branch. Her hands grasped the clammy wood and she pulled herself up just as the corpses reached the tree.

  She dropped her journal as she climbed higher.

  The zombies could claw at the tree but their rotten muscles lacked the strength to pull themselves up the branches. She was safe.

  Or not.

  “Don’t you remember?” they moaned as they began to rock the tree against its moorings.

  Maggie climbed higher, as high as she could, to the very top, where the black branches barely supported her weight. There were no leaves. No blossoms. No fruit, save a single apple, hanging from the uppermost branch. Twelve reanimated corpses pushed and pulled her tree into a sickening sway. The apple swung before her face like a hypnotist’s watch.

  She reached out and wrapped her hand around the plump fruit. She plucked it.

  “Don’t you remember!” the zombies shouted. Not a question—a command. “Don’t you dare remember!”

  The apple crumbled to dust in her palm. It ran through her grasping fingers like so much sand, just as the roots finally gave way and her tree toppled forward, spilling her headlong into the black abyss of her own grave.

  “Ahhhhh!!”

  She jerked awake and looked around, her heart beating out of her chest. She was still in the train compartment. No grave. That was good.

  Mercifully, no one had joined her in the compartment while she was sleeping. She wiped the sweat from her brow and waited for her heart to slow.

  It was the first time she’d slept since waking up in the hotel room. In addition to everything else she’d forgotten, she’d also forgotten about the dreams.

  She leaned her head against the cool glass of the train window.

  At least she knew one thing: she’d used the magic. The nightmares always came after she used the magic.

  She just didn’t know what she’d done. Or why.

  She closed her eyes and concentrated on the calming sway of the train over the tracks. She wondered how long until Aberdeen. But, in a way, it didn’t matter.

  She sure as Hell wasn’t going back to sleep.

  4. Nightmares Come True Too

  Ellie MacGregor sat on the floor of the Aberdeen bus station, her spine knocking against the hard marble wall from her shivering despite the unseasonably warm morning. The floor was dirty, but it had been a long time since she cared about getting dirty, since she even noticed dirt. The filth she had seen in her life was well beyond a layer of dust and soot and spilled drinks on a bus station floor.

  She was back in Aberdeen. Not out of choice, exactly. Not out of necessity, either. Just because. Because salmon and elephants and people went back to where they came from when it was time to give up and die.

  She didn’t have anywhere to go. Home hadn’t been home since she’d run away two decades ago. When word had reached her that her mom had died, she’d cried. When she’d gotten word her dad had died, she’d celebrated. At least he’d never hurt anyone again. Not her. Not her brothers or sisters either. Not that any of them ever helped her. She didn’t want to see them either. They all thought they were better than her because they’d put up with it all and pretended it never happened, but she was too strong to do that.

  She looked down at her hands. They weren’t very strong hands any more. They were thin and weak and wrinkled well beyond their thirty-some years. She was past the time when she could easily earn the money for her next fix. She could still do it, just not easily.

  That left the shelter. She hadn’t been in Aberdeen for years, but she knew they had a shelter somewhere. Probably several of them. She wondered where the nearest one was. Then, despite herself, she wondered how far she’d have to go to find that next fix. And where she could go to earn the money for it.

  She put her heads in her hands. She would have cried, but she’d forgotten how to let herself do that.

  It wasn’t getting any better. It never got any better. She was losing what little hope she’d clung to over the years. Maybe the people at the shelter could help her. Maybe if she listened to them this time. Maybe if she followed the rules and asked for help when she was feeling weak. Maybe somebody would actually help her. Maybe someone would at least pretend like they cared.

  “Do you need some help, miss?”

  Ellie looked up. There was a woman standing over her. A woman with nice clothes and a kind face. A woman a little older than her, but clean and pretty and smiling. A woman like Ellie’s mother. Ellie didn’t reply. She didn’t know what to say. It felt like she didn’t even know how to reply.

  The woman smiled and crouched down so she was at Ellie’s eye level. “I say, do you need some help, miss?”

  ‘Miss.’ Ellie liked that. It had been a while since she’d been young enough to warrant a miss. But she wasn’t really old enough for a ‘ma’am’ yet either. She got called lots of things. Most of them weren’t very nice. She liked being called ‘miss.’

  She still felt like she couldn’t talk, so she just nodded at the woman with the kind face.

  The woman nodded back. “I thought so.” She stood up and extended a hand to Ellie. After a moment, Ellie took it—ashamed for the first time in a long time that her hands were dirty—and let the kind woman pull her to her feet.

  “You need a place to stay, don’t you?” the kind woman asked. “Some food and a bath and somewhere to lay your head while you get back on your feet.”

  Ellie nodded again. She finally found her voice. “Aye,” she croaked.

  The kind woman smiled and picked up Ellie’s bag for her. Ellie knew it was filthy and stank. The woman pretended it didn’t.

  “Come with me then,” the woman said. “I’ll take care of you.”

  Ellie nodded and started to walk toward the exit with the woman.

  “What’s your name?” the kind woman asked.

  “Ellie,” she replied.

  The woman smiled but kept her eye on the exit. “Nice to meet you, Ellie. I’m Sarah.”

  5. Resting Places

  Maggie’s walk from the train station to her flat had its own dreamlike quality. She knew the way, of course, but it was the times she focused on her journey that she began to get lost. Which street to follow, which way to turn at an intersection, which fork in the winding Aberdeen roads. If she thought about it too hard, she didn’t know which way to go. But when she was lost in other thoughts,
her feet took her the right way, her subconscious seeming to know that which her conscious mind didn’t.

  Her memory was still spongy and unreliable. Some things were as clear as day, others as murky as a Highland bog. And there was still that large gap of localized but complete amnesia: she didn’t remember a thing between Visegrád and Edinburgh. So it was with a relief similar to waking from a disturbing dream that she turned the final corner and spotted the door to her apartment. She slipped her key into the lock and stepped inside her home for the first time in she didn’t know how long—literally.

  Her flat was draped in that thick blanket of silence that falls over a residence when its occupant leaves for an extended period. Too short a time to pack up or clean out. But long enough to draw the shades and leave the fridge bare save whatever groceries had been left over at the time of departure. Her trip to Hungary hadn’t been entirely impromptu, but it hadn’t been long anticipated either. A light dust covered the surfaces. The milk in the fridge had expired.

  She walked into her bedroom. The bed was made, the sheets tucked tightly. Her closet doors were closed and her hamper was mostly empty. That same light dust covered everything. Everything except the keyboard of her laptop, tipped open on her desk.

  A simple press of the ‘on’ button confirmed the battery was dead.

  She fetched the power cord from her desk drawer and plugged it into the wall, then she turned it on and lay down to rest her spinning head on the fluffed and ready pillow while the computer started up.

  *

  The young man behind the desk didn’t look up from his laptop as the police officer entered the small cottage at the entrance to the Aberdeen Municipal Cemetery. Sergeant Elizabeth Warwick was unimpressed by the lack of reception. She had an appointment. She was on time. And she was, after all, the police.

  She straightened to her full 5′ 9″ height and cleared her throat.

  “One moment,” the young man said. Warwick guessed he was barely twenty. Young enough to not need to shave every day, and immature enough to make that obvious by not doing so that morning. An eager, but inadequate, fuzz dusted his chin and lip, while completely ignoring his cheeks. His red hair was cropped short, but curled nonetheless, and his youthful vanity prevented him from wearing glasses, his need for which was obvious as he squinted at the computer screen only inches from his face. “I just need to update my status.”