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here was a red glow to the north, and the moonlight revealed a tangled plume of smoke, marring the sky. Lisa was standing on the balcony, shivering a little in the thin November wind. I draped a throw across her slender shoulders. It wasn’t tee shirt weather out there.
“Bring me the night glasses, lover, will you?”
I fetched a pair of 7x50 Bushnells out of the hall closet. We kept them there for casual astronomy, and times like this.
“It’s the old Fairdeal Paint plant,” she said. “What a blaze!”
Newspaper reporters love fires—they make good copy and they’re easy to write up. Lisa was still a writer with printer’s ink in her veins, a newsroom warrior at heart.
“Went up like a paint factory,” I said.
“Boy, howdy!” Lisa exclaimed as a violent spray of red and orange sparks shot up. “Place has been closed for twenty years, but those solvents linger!”
I managed to get her inside after an hour, and into bed. Her feet were like corned beef brisket, fresh from the case, but she was desperate to make love.
I pinned her hands over her head, knowing that a shredded back would be the price of letting them get loose, and there wasn’t time to get the oven mitts or the handcuffs.
She went off like a bomb, and made nearly as much noise as I pressed her harder and made her go off again and again.
When we stopped, she fell asleep as quickly as if she’d been sapped, and I followed suit a few minutes later. |
The morning paper told an interesting and macabre tale.
There were eight bodies found, baked black and shriveled by by the heat—homeless people squatting in the abandoned structure, smoking cigarettes, spliffs and crack by candlelight, guzzling cheap hooch and sleeping in nests of rags and paper.
The old building had been a meat packing house for many years, and a sort of charnel smell clung to it, even with the malodorous volatiles used for manufacturing paints.
The fire hadn’t eliminated the ghastly pong entirely, but it did open the possibility of development in a section of the city long derelict and forgotten.
Cold as it sounds, nobody was going to miss the winos, either.
Lisa had a sniffle.
“When you stand in the open, barefooted in November, darling,” I told her,“you can expect to catch cold.”
She sneezed, and made a face at me.“I got excited—that was quite a fire.”
“Neither one of us is as young as we used to be, Lisa. You can’t expect to be careless and not pay a price.”
“Oh, snap!” she grumped.“You can be such a fuddy-duddy!”
I laughed and pulled on my tweed jacket. There were errands to run. And a quick swing by the old factory site—after all, I’m only human. |
The Fire Chief, Mickey Perkins, was at the smoking ruin, looking displeased. Mickey was a crooked bastard, but he was also the bravest man I’d ever met, with a genius for putting out fires.
Once, he’d taken a hose into a burning building and brought out five of his firefighters and seven civilians when everyone else said it was suicide. He managed to extinguish the fire, too, though that took three hours.
“Hey! I was just going to call you!” he boomed. “We found a sub cellar musta been forgotten about! Some archaeologists are coming from Penn State to look at it, but maybe you’ll know something?”
He led me through the mess to an opening, where I could see a cavernous space below. A flight of metal steps led down. Mickey had a powerful spotlight lantern, and we clanged into the gloom.
The floor was partially cobblestones, which was odd, and partially Belgian blocks, with the cobbles forming a rough cross pattern, and at the intersection of the two lines, there was a large slab, cracked across by the heat.
“Look in there,” Mickey said with a grin.
I took the light, and peered into a rough and narrow chamber, where a mummified body lay, transfixed by a wooden stake through the center of its chest, pinned to the earth.
“Vampire?” Micky said, with a lopsided grin.
“I have no idea,” I told him.
“The people from Penn State were near be-peed when I told them,” Micky guffawed. “I’ll bet they come down here a-helling, and crawl all over it like piss ants!”
I had no doubt he was right—this was strange enough to get national attention. I tried to get a better look. The light was so powerful I almost expected recoil, but the shadows were still quite dense.
And the smell was ghastly, a thick, mephitic stench like dead snakes and mothballs, mixed with some very old sewage—Hurricane Agnes had flooded this area about six feet deep in ’71.
Fire purifies, of course, but it also stirs up evil things. Abandoned buildings attract all sorts of wickedness, vice and sin.
A corpse with a stake through the heart is not going to be part of a happy story—even though I could see that the dead man had a wry neck, probably courtesy of the hangman’s noose.
Now that my eyes were adjusted to the deep gloom, I could make out the tatters of clothing, and see that the elbows were pinioned with thick rope, and the ankles tightly bound.
“Hanged,” I said to Mickey.“Looks like a legal execution, too.”
“Why a stake through the heart? Did they think he was Dracula?”
For once, somebody else could answer that question. |
I stopped by the Giant, got a couple of Cuban sandwiches and went home to feed Lisa, now that she was eating again.
Three vans full of eager faces had fallen upon the fire scene like the locusts came to Egypt. They took scads of photographs, which was good, because on the third day, in spite of a Police guard, the body was gone. The stake, the ropes and the mouldered clothing were there, but the corpse was not.
“What happened?” Lisa asked me over her breakfast tea as I made her some toast points and set out some plum marmalade for her.“Oh, lover, you’re so good to me! I love this stuff!”
“The body probably fell to dust. Sometimes they do that when the air gets to them, after they’ve been sealed away for a long time.” I buttered the last of the toast and set the plate down in front of her.
She fell to, like a wolf off the ice cap, her face a study in pure contentment. “And how did he come to be there in the first place?” she asked me.
“I haven’t got clue one, and I think I’ll let the professionals explain it. They have the resources and the manpower, and several very competent people, too.” |
Over the next several weeks, Lisa and I drifted apart. We didn’t stop loving each other, we were in no way estranged, except that we became mentally separated for a bit.
She was finishing her book, proofreading, revising slightly, then doing the business stuff with her publisher, the galley proofs and the approvals for the type faces, jacket art and, of course, her photo for the back flap.
I was involved in something uglier.
A small Midwestern city was experiencing a series of razor killings, and Voodoo veves were found at some of the scenes.
Straight razors aren’t much favored by criminals any more, but they’re a slow and horrible way to die, usually requiring a lot of deep slashes to bleed the victim out, while they suffer fear and pain in the final minutes. There’s a lot of blood, too.
Recreational killers like razors and hawk bill knives because they produce screaming and gushing gouts of blood for them to gloat over, while they relish the godlike thrill of taking a human life, just because they can.
I looked at the photos. They don’t bother me—I’ve seen too much death to let it make me uncomfortable on anything but an intellectual level. Besides, there were plenty of people to deplore, and only a few to catch the killers and stop them.
It was killers, plural, a look at the bodies showed three separate styles of attack: one a frenzied slasher, another a deep and deliberate cutter who picked blood vessels with some care, and the last, a disemboweler with a signature method of making a deep cross shaped incision on the abdomen, letting the viscera spill out.
Drug gangs often practice supernatural rites, something many of them brought from the Old Country (wherever that might have been) to secure good luck, avoid arrest and scare the bejabbers out of the competition.
This bunch was using the darkest Petro-Congo rites, invoking the power of Baron Samedi, Lord of the Graveyard.
The problem kept me occupied for a while, until I caught a reference source that referred to a peculiar veve used on a small island in the West Indies to summon that dark and powerful loa.
There was a small immigrant community from that island in the city. They had a small group of Rude Boys moving product, so an arrest was not long delayed.
It was a death penalty state, and I could only hope. |
An item from in local paper caught my eye one morning.
“Shadow Man Terrifies Students,” detailed, in a snide sort of way, the appearance of a “black man, like a hole in the air, a shadow with nobody there,” in the student housing area of York College.
On a Friday night, cheap wine might have been to blame, but this was a Tuesday. The students were sober, and a stone serious group of scholars as well.
I turned my attention to a printout of the conclusions drawn by the virtual task force studying the body from the old paint works.
In 1806, the quarter sessions of the York County Court condemned a man named Mohias Dung to be hanged, and “buried at the crossroads with a stake through his heart.”
This was not unprecedented. The Ratcliffe Highway killer was dealt with in the same way, in England. But Mohias Dung made that villain seem like a naughty child.
This depraved creature had inhabited a stinking hovel in a section of the city that was destroyed utterly by a fire in 1822. There he had made a bare living by selling sausages, and providing various magical spells and herb cures to the denizens of those revolting stews—and to more prosperous citizens who might slip away briefly and avail themselves of his many services.
Mohias Dung, who was reputed to be a fugitive pirate, had been an associate of the infamous Mordecai Brenner in the Conway Cabal incident, an abortive attempt by Horatio Gates to wrest command of the Continental Army from Washington.
He had used his reputation as an herb doctor of sorts to roam the city, especially in the turbulent Army headquarters, to cover his role as a messenger among the conspirators.
The lethargic legal establishment of York had finally dealt decisively with this man when a local Squire, suspecting that a prized hunting dog had been transformed into links, burst into Dung’s hut, brandishing a horsewhip, only to stagger out and spew his most recent meal over the revolting yard.
Some complaints of missing urchins—not much in the way of complaints—were resolved, as horrified constables found a welter of children’s bones.
Mohias Dung was hanged in due course, staked at the intersection of Prince Fredrick Street and Gloriana Avenue, two thoroughfares that vanished when the area was rebuilt after the fire. The paved section became cellar floors for new buildings, including the abattoir where the now forgotten grave of Mohias Dung was located.
York has a very short memory. |
The first body was discovered in January, mummified and frozen in a half ruined industrial complex, long unused.
A few weeks later, another one, a career prostitute with a long arrest record—her parole officer had been looking for her.
Then a runaway teenager, dead and dessicated in a storage shed.
No visible wounds, no marks, no toxic residue to be found.
Reports of the “Shadow Man” brought whole gangs of tabloid reporters and professional spook chasers running, making up any facts they wanted, because the actual answers simply weren’t there, and in the spring, bands of bored and pimply kids were roaming the streets looking for the thing that was now being called “Umbra Man.”
I was puzzled. I sent some mail.
More information on Mohias Dung surfaced in some court records in Liverpool, where he had been flogged and branded on the palm for being a rogue and a vagabond in 1756.
A few notes written by the Judge revealed that his father was one Dung Xing, a Sino-Portuguese corsair and his mother was a half-caste whore from Calcutta.
With this pedigree, it was no great wonder that young Mohias shipped as a powder monkey on a Spanish warship, then moved on to a barquentine full of prime Moro cutthroats, where he rapidly rose to the position of Quartermaster.
He was tried as a pirate in Liverpool, but the case was weak, so he was punished for lesser crimes. From there, he went to Philadelphia, where he was put in the stocks for drunkenness in 1760. He drifted west, and made York his home base for the rest of his nasty and disreputable life.
He was hanged with a very short rope. |
The razor case came back to haunt me briefly. A nervous young prosecutor called.
“I may want you to testify,” she said bluntly.
“Why?” I could be just as blunt. “All that’ll get you is a tangled case, and a confused jury.”
“It goes to motivation,” she said.
“Motivation be damned,” I told her. “This was murder, first degree, no possible mitigation from their screwball religious beliefs. Human sacrifice is no excuse, last time I looked.”
“Then you think I should handle it like any serial murder case?”
“Hell, yes, don’t give the jury anything to get distracted with, because they’ll be up and away at the least excuse, and you’ll get the lesser charge, or an acquittal.”
“Did you get a look at the razor?" she asked. “I sent you a picture.” I think she saw my logic, but she was still as nervous as a cat.
“Yes, nothing special about it, just an old Love of God that’s been kicking around for generations.”
“Love of God?”
“Notice the jagged edge on that thing? That’s from years of neglect, and being used for other things beside shaving.
“There’s a song about a barber who kept a razor like that for people who asked for shaves on credit, and one day, a guy asked him for a shave, ‘for the love of God,’ and got this old razor used on him. Then later, he heard a mule bawling, and said, ‘Some other poor devil is getting the Love of God shave.’
“So sometimes old razors were called Love of Gods.”
This struck her funny, and she said goodbye, laughing, and I dodged a trip to court.
That night, Lisa was curled up on my lap, as curled up as a woman that tall could get.
“Lover,” she said sadly,“Children are disappearing.”
I kept my peace; she had something to get off her chest.
“You know how many undocumented people there are here, people who don’t show up on any official lists, whose kids never get registered for school?
“A lot, and when they go missing, nobody notices, or if they do, they don’t give a rat’s ass.”
“Kids in this town tend to be a nuisance,” I said, “This is a mean place, and the children are meaner than normal kids, which is pretty damn mean!”
“Even so, children shouldn’t disappear with nobody the wiser.”
“That’s true enough,” I agreed. “Now how many have vanished? I know very well you talked to your old sources on the street.”
Lisa had a network of spies that made the Mossad look wimpy. Just a smile, and her strappy sandals, and secrets were revealed to her.
“So far, six, about one every two weeks, and not a single bit of evidence.”
“The coppers don’t like that. It’s bad for the careers of the mighty. Best to ignore it,” I said.
No doubt, Lisa was remembering the Atlanta Child Killer case, and how it never quite got resolved to anyone’s satisfaction.
“Lover, you know something. When those envelopes with the foreign stamps show up, I know you’re getting answers.”
“I suspect something, and this makes me even more suspicious. You’ve seen enough to know what we’re dealing with—the Powers, the Kings and the Drowners,” I told her. “They have territories, areas of influence, and this is Shub-Niggurath’s version of Disneyland. She can manifest here, and much stronger than almost anywhere else. I can’t explain that, but it’s the truth.
“Mohias Dung had to do with Her, and he ate human flesh. That has a certain effect—it makes a person‘gripsome of life’ according to the Ghorl Nigral.”
“You think he rose from the dead?”
“That stake would have held him bound, hawthorn is a wood with properties, and pinned to the earth by it, he was going nowhere. But when the air got to his corpse, and it fell to dust, he would be free to reconstitute himself, because the stake was out of him.
“First, he’d need blood and fluids, so he sent his shadow self to gather that, and when he was wet enough hang together, he went looking for flesh-he’s one of the Wandering Damned, and they crave flesh, so they can enter the world again and do wrong.”
“What’s to do, lover?”
“If I can find him, I can stake him again, someplace where he won’t be able to escape for a very long time.”
We began to scour the mean streets at night-I took my fancy Taurus nine and a switch knife with a razor sharp five inch blade, Lisa slipped a butterfly knife and a compact Star automatic into her clothes.
Lisa had spent several years working out of Manila, and she’d been trained by a very good escrimidora, so at least, we could fight off local thugs.
For Mohias Dung, we had hawthorn stakes.
We chanced upon an abandoned auto repair garage, in a neighborhood where the rats had post traumatic stress disorder and the roaches woke up screaming, where they used pistols for paperweights and lived every day on the edge of death.
There were bones and flesh drying on improvised racks. Worse, there were spices and salt. Mohias Dung liked his meat tangy.
The local cops were not pleased. We had sent the tip in anonymously, and they did a very neat cover up, hoping to avoid a riot.
Somewhere, he was wandering still, damned and undying, serving the Black Goat of the Woods.
Lisa and I decided to get watchdogs, and hoped it would help. |
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