Dead Silent

by Ivan Blake

  “Okay,” Jackie said, a little taken aback by all the cloak and dagger crap and by the fact that Abrahms himself seemed genuinely rattled.

  The commander turned on the monitor, slipped the tape into a VCR, and pressed play. The screen came to life with black and white images, apparently a laundry room.

  “The inmates are required to wash their own clothes,” Abrahms explained, “to learn some personal responsibility. This happened six months back.”

  Chris Chandler walked into the picture and started to remove items from a dryer. A minute or so later, another kid came in and apparently started shouting at Chandler. Chandler remained silent. The kid approached Chandler and began pushing him. Chris tried to back away. After some more shoving, the kid took a swing at Chris but he evaded the punch. Suddenly, Chris grabbed the kid in a tight embrace, said something in his ear, and kissed him on the cheek. The kid freaked, shook Chris off and shoved him hard against the wall where Chris fell to the floor...and smiled.

  A burst of bright light flooded the screen.

  Jackie jumped forward in her chair. “What was that?”

  Abrahms said nothing.

  More flashes of light, then a swirling mist descended from up near the laundry room ceiling.

  “Was it some sort of electrical short, or a fire?” she asked.

  There was a second flash and the kid fell back in surprise, but then violently spun about, doubled over and lost his lunch. As he fell to the floor, he writhed about like he was being kicked again and again. His left leg shot up into the air and began turning at the knee. Something suddenly gave way in the kid’s leg and from the knee down he spun freely in the air. The kid was clearly screaming in agony. Suddenly dropped to the floor, his crumpled body slid across the tiles and struck the far wall face first. There was one final flash of light before the screen went dark.

  “What the hell happened?”

  “Well, for one thing, the camera was toast,” Abrahms replied.

  “To the kid?”

  “He suffered broken ribs, a perforated diaphragm. He lost the lower part of his leg since every ligament and sinew had been shredded, and he had to have his jaw wired for six months. And Chris Chandler never touched him. He sat in the corner the whole time, as you saw.”

  “And no one else was in the room,” Jackie said in amazement.

  “No.”

  “What did the kid see?”

  “Don’t know. He’s in the looney bin downstate,” Abrahms said as he hit rewind. “He can’t talk...or won’t.”

  “So do you have tapes of any other attacks?”

  “No...We’re not permitted to tape the kids. Just happened there’d been some vandalism in the laundry that week, and we’d set up a camera for a couple of days.”

  “And you’re sure nobody used this equipment to edit the tape, maybe create that weird lightning effect?”

  “You think anybody would be working in a zoo like this if he knew how to edit video?”

  “So you’ve no idea what happened?”

  “No. Do you?”

  “No. Not yet anyhow.”

  * * * *

  This wasn’t how Chris’s disappearance was supposed to go down. He was supposed to remain anonymous, stay out of trouble, focus on his courses, and apply to a couple of colleges, not look after a graveyard for some crazy woman who claimed to see ghosts and know a two-hundred-year-old corpse by its first name. And he most certainly was not supposed to tackle anymore grave robbers. Still, Rose DuCalice had seen Mallory, and that was amazing since no one else in fourteen months had been able to see her. Better still, Rose thought she might be able to help Chris fend off Mallory, and maybe even protect Gillian, and that would be so incredibly great.

  So what could it hurt to have a look at Rose’s graveyard? Besides, after fourteen months in detention, the fresh air was terrific. And whatever weird stuff Rose had put on his wounds had actually done him the world of good. He was feeling stronger than he had in ages.

  The air was still crisp, but the sun was warm on his face as he struggled through the drifts of rotting snow and then slid on his butt down the bluff to the pond.

  The pond was now ice-free. It probably froze most nights but the warmth of the day quickly melted the ice. The pond’s dark water was as still as glass and as clear as crystal. Nothing moved in its depths, not yet anyway. The enormous house on the bluff above was reflected perfectly on its surface.

  Whoa, there it was again, movement in a tower window, mirrored in the pool this time.

  He spun about and stared up at the house. Nothing. Birds most likely; they were probably getting into the tower through a hole in the roof, nesting in the stairwell like chimney swifts. Perhaps he’d try to open the door in the cellar sometime; someone should chase the birds out of the tower before the smell of their droppings became a serious problem. After all, he was supposed to perform a little maintenance on the cottage, so maybe he’d try.

  Chris had some difficulty getting around the lake. He found no path. Slowly, careful not to slide or stumble into the cold, still water, he pushed his way through deep brush and a dense tangle of branches, slogged through drifts of crystalline snow, and hopped from rock to rock along the water’s edge. Eventually he came across what appeared to be the remnants of a trail away from the pond and up through the dense spruce.

  At last Chris emerged into the clearing Rose had pointed out from the cottage. He’d been expecting the cemetery to be a more impressive place than he now beheld. He couldn’t see more than two dozen lichen-covered stones, and many of them had been pushed out of the ground or toppled altogether by tree roots and decades of frost. Apparently no one had bothered to tidy the cemetery in years, so why, Chris wondered, did Rose attach so much importance to the place?

  Nothing moved. No bird sang or rose into the afternoon sky. Not a breath of March breeze stirred the trees. The place felt so...creepy. Chris had this overwhelming sense that if he made any sound at all, the offended souls sleeping in their hidden graveyard might rise out of the ground and silence him.

  He picked his way across the clearing as quietly and as carefully as he could, counting the stones as he went. Twenty-six with full inscriptions, three with names only, and all bearing the same strange cross. The inscribed stones bore death dates but no birthdates, and all but three told heart-wrenching stories of heroism and self-sacrifice. Did no one ever simply pass away from old age or illness or drunk driving among the Lewis community of Cathars? Chris scraped the lichen from one stone and read its inscription:

  Angele Liotte (nee Monsegur) deceased Huronia February 16, 1642 Devoted mother, beloved sister, Cathar Credenta. Died of starvation having given her entire winter ration of food in secret to an orphaned native child in her care.

  How in heaven’s name had someone carried Angele’s remains all the way from Huronia to Lewis in the seventeenth century? And why?

  The dozen or so deaths that had occurred in wartime represented every conflict of the past three hundred years, from the French and Indian Wars and the American Revolution to the Civil War, and the two World Wars. The most recent casualty had died in Vietnam.

  Richard Isarn died March 11, 1970 Beloved son and brother, Cathar Credente. Lieutenant, 3rd Battalion, 12th Infantry, killed during Operation Greene Deuce, Pleiku Province, Vietnam. Raymond threw himself on a VC landmine, saving the lives of seven team members, for which he was posthumously awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.

  Chris eventually found the headstone of Rose’s spirit friend, Rixende Donat, who’d died in 1703. A tree that had grown through her grave had recently fallen over and Chris could see where something—most likely her skull—had been pried from among its roots. Just as Rose suspected, someone had been here recently, poking about, and had carried off poor Rixende’s skull. And according to Rose, Rixende was weeping nearby.

  Sitting on the trunk of a fallen spruce, he stared at Rixende’s stone. With the exertion and the fresh air of the past hour, fatigue quickl
y stole over him. The sun felt so warm on his back. The air above Rixende’s headstone shimmered, and seemed to move. Long shadows touched the stone as the sun sank toward the hills. Chris saw colors in the shimmering light, first a touch of bronze, then a sweep of blue, and then waves of gold like hair moving in the breeze. “You must look through the color, past the air, between the breezes,” Rose had said. Chris was feeling dizzy now, maybe from so much sun. Then through the shimmering sunlight, he glimpsed the line of a cheek, there in the blue. And now an eye, and a tear catching the late afternoon sun. A tear....

  He heard voices. Two or three, moving his way from the hills above, coming down through the woods toward the cemetery.

  Chris moved quickly and quietly back across the clearing and down the trail to the pond, where he threw himself into a tangle of tall grasses and young willow. Then he waited.

  * * * *

  Gilbert wasn’t Dolli’s first white boy, but he was the whitest. In fact, he was so white, he was icky. His skin not only looked like dead flesh, it felt cold and clammy like a fish, and if you poked his skin with your finger, it didn’t bounce back like normal living tissue. The impression of your finger remained, like a dent poked in wet clay. Sometimes her stomach roiled to have him on top of her. So why had she stayed with him, what was it, for two years now? Because beggars can’t be choosers? Okay, perhaps it was partly that, but Gilbert wasn’t a complete ass, and that was truly something, given the army of asses she’d encountered in her life.

  Her father had been a useless wreck, mother a pathetic weakling, and five brothers, all aimless, drunken idiots, all except for the one brother she’d loved and who’d killed himself with a handgun in front of her when she was fifteen. Like a pathetic fool, she’d once believed she might be able to escape the squalor and the desperation around her, to find another course for her life. She’d studied hard in school even though the teachers had all been evil. A couple of the male teachers hadn’t been able to keep their hands to themselves; they’d been pigs, but they hadn’t been the worst. The worst had been the teachers who’d nurtured the delusion she could escape fate if only she tried hard enough.

  They should all die in agony for perpetuating that lie.

  After high school, she’d moved to Phoenix, gotten a job at a McDonalds, taken writing classes at night, and met a bunch of poets. She’d even taken to writing stuff herself, and received praise from a few people. Submitting work to contests and journals, however, went nowhere. Too native, one editor had said, too grim, another. The circle of poets had begun to wear on her nerves with all their crap about gender rage and feminism and class warfare, and big hair and cocaine, so she’d moved on.

  Then she’d met the Goths. Their dark clothes and strange makeup appealed because that’s where her head was at the time. They’d hung out in a club where they’d listened to music about death and graves and emptiness, and taken turns reading their poems aloud. One of the group had been a high school English teacher who’d said Dolli had a special talent for seeing beyond the veil. Turned out, he’d only wanted to see inside her clothes. Of course, like some pathetic adolescent, she’d gotten pregnant. The baby had died in her womb in the third trimester, and she’d had to carry the dead fetus for another two months until she’d delivered. That had really messed her up. The English teacher tried to say losing the baby was for the best, and she should search for the meaning in its loss, like putting her pain into poetry. His pseudo-sensitivity had been so asinine, she’d immediately realized what a shallow dickhead he was and left.

  With nothing to show for two years in Phoenix, except the child-shaped emptiness in her heart, she’d returned to Barnes. Then Gilbert Burgoyne came along, the strange white dude with no pretense to anything remotely intellectual. He’d been just out there, with no notion of any meaning or purpose to life, just getting by, watching stars, tinkering with his hearse, and selling skulls. He’d loved her boobs, was horny as hell, and had made no attempt to conceal either fact. When he’d learned that she wrote poetry, he’d thought it was a huge joke. He’d told her the stuff she wrote was crap, and he’d been right. He’d been the first guy to tell her the truth. But then, irony of ironies, he’d started writing his own plays and suddenly her stupid, simple, truthful boyfriend had decided he was so goddamn insightful. It had been hilarious, but by then, in some strange way, she’d needed him, and he sure as hell needed her.

  His life had been one big screw-up—bills unpaid, checks lost, orders for bones unanswered—so she’d started getting him organized, and the dolt didn’t even know it. Then he’d learned of his inheritance back in Vermont and announced he was leaving Barnes and wanted her to come along. She’d thought, okay, she didn’t have any better offers, and she hated Barnes, so why the hell not? Besides, better to see the world from the front seat of a hearse than from the back. But—and she’d been firm about this—if they were going to open a theater and perform Gilbert’s plays, then they’d do it right.

  So now Gilbert, Dolli and the twins were wandering down a trail in northern Vermont looking for an old graveyard to plunder. How, she wondered, would that dickhead of a poetry teacher find meaning in this?

  “When we find the place, Gilbert, what are we going to do?” Blood asked.

  “Poke around. Check it out.”

  “We’re not going to dig up anything today?”

  “Not yet. I think maybe we’ll clean away some of the roots and bushes.”

  “Why would we do that if we’re only going to dig them up later?” Dolli said. “I don’t need to tell you how much we need cash.”

  “Yeah, but we also need the DuCalice woman,” Gilbert replied. “So maybe if we show a little respect for her cemetery, we might get on her good side.”

  “I get it!” Blood said with a smile. “We pretend we like the bitch—”

  Sweat finished his brother’s thought. “—Then we take every bone in the place.”

  * * * *

  Chris heated a can of spaghetti for dinner and made a cup of hot tea to shake off his chill. He’d spent more than an hour hiding in damp grass and thorn bushes, and for his pains, he’d learned practically nothing, just that the four weirdos from the movie theater—far from vandalizing the old cemetery—had actually tidied the place. So much for Rose DuCalice’s suspicions. He hadn’t been able to make out much of what they’d discussed, but he had heard one of them say, “Hope that satisfies the old lady.”

  After they’d left, Chris crept back to the cemetery to examine their handiwork. It hadn’t been bad. The four Goths had hacked vines and grasses away from most of the headstones, pulled weeds out of several collapsed graves, scraped lichen off a number of headstones and even managed to straighten a few stones that had fallen over completely. In general, they’d removed the tangle of weeds and thorns that had previously made it so difficult to recognize the clearing as a graveyard. As cemeteries go, the place was still pretty rude and grim, but the Goths had done a decent job of exposing the two dozen graves. How could Rose DuCalice possibly object? Maybe for just that reason, because the graves of her ancestors were now so visible...and vulnerable.

  Okay, so maybe Rose DuCalice wasn’t going to be pleased when she learned of the cleanup, but why should Chris care? None of this was his affair. He was in Vermont to study and to stay out of trouble, not to worry about some stranger’s graveyard.

  He ate his spaghetti at the sink, rinsed the bowl and spoon, and took a mug of tea out onto the front porch to stare into the darkness. He could see little beyond the ring of light from inside the house, so he walked down the front steps and across the lawn to the edge of the bluff.

  The night was clear and cold, and the sky filled with stars and just a sliver of a moon. Below the bluff, the surface of Cathy’s Pond was a mirror image of the same bejewelled sky. He listened. So weird! Nothing, not a sound, no cry of a raptor on the hunt, not the snap of a branch or the rustle of leaves, no yapping dog or yowling cat, no creature of any kind scrabbling through the underg
rowth, just silence. The Goths had apparently used a trail over the hills from town to approach the cemetery. It unnerved Chris to think anyone—most especially strangers with no business being on Monsegur property—might be able to approach the house without him knowing.

  They might even be down there now, in the dark, looking up here. Okay that was a thought to creep out anyone.

  Chris went back inside, locked the doors, switched on all the lamps in the library and the parlor, and turned up the thermostat. He stood in the middle of the huge parlor, with its dark furniture and soaring ceiling, its gigantic windows and few pathetic lamps…and listened. He listened to the whole house, all three floors of it, four if you counted the immense cellar, all twelve rooms, hallways and staircases, mounted animals and birds and gruesome pictures, dark corners and hidden cupboards. He listened to the moan from the old Kelvinator in the kitchen, shudders from the cellar each time the furnace came on, cracks and creaks from the beams in the roof and squeaks from the floorboards throughout the house as the rooms warmed. This was to be his second night in Marymount Cottage, but the first when he wasn’t knocked out by Rose’s homemade pharmaceuticals.

  He tried the TV in the parlor, but there was no signal. He grabbed a handful of old Look magazines from a table in one of the bay windows and settled himself in a large leather armchair, but not for long. The magazines didn’t interest him, and every new sound from the house distracted him. He got up, paced the room, peered out the windows and imagined people creeping about in the dark beyond the circle of light, digging up graves, watching his every move.

  The phone rang.

  Chris picked it up quickly before the caller could ring off, relieved at the notion of speaking to another living being. But then the thought crossed his mind that perhaps he shouldn’t have answered, that he might not want to know who was calling? After all, who in the world knew he was there?

  He lifted the receiver to his ear but said nothing. For a moment, there was only silence on the line, then a man’s voice.