| |
 |
 |
erry met me at the old Presbyterian Church in Scotia.
I’d promised to look into some problem he had, and since he was a decent enough fellow, I was following up.
“I want to show you this, first, then we can go over to my house for a drink,” he said, “I want to see what you make of it.”
The wind flung the skirts of our overcoats about our legs, and threatened our hats, as we walked through the winding paths, among the monuments, past the huge mausoleum, deeper and deeper into the old part of the graveyard.
We finally came to an odd sort of fold in the ground, where a single headstone, irregular and stained like a broken off tooth stood, flanked by a white oleander bush.
“I try to do an inspection tour every few days, in the fall and winter, the grounds crew is out here spring and summer, but when it’s cold, I’m the one who keeps an eye on things.
“I have a full time grave digger on staff, and Rob takes care of most of the other jobs during that time, but I think I ought to personally look around, see if I can spot vandalism and such before anyone else notices.
“Keeping the place clean and nice is the secret to a successful cemetery, makes people feel a little better about leaving their loved ones with us.
“I was checking the back of the mausoleum here—kids are always getting up to stuff around that place, it’s been full since the ’thirties, the old church built it just before the Depression, and never had the money to enlarge it.
“I’m aways afraid they’ll get inside—it’s a time capsule in there, we dust it eight times a year, and inspect for vermin and damage, but it’s left alone, otherwise, and if it got torn up, it’d cost a mint to restore.
“So I have a look, and notice an area I’d never seen before, and went to look it over.
“You have to be careful, in this business, my Dad taught us that, if you neglect a part of your grounds, all sorts of things happen, desecrations, even people burying pets, for God’s sake!”
The monument was a slab, the old fashioned, kind, and it bore a crudely carven skull and bones, with a faded epitaph, worn away by wind and acidic rain, and it had begun to sink into the ground.
It was difficult to read the old font, so deteriorated, but it said: |
MORDECAI BRENNER
He robbed the poor
He cheated the rich
May he burn in Hell
The Son-of-a-Bitch!
|
The dates seem to have been on the sunken part.
I took out my camera phone and shot a picture of it, for Lisa.
“OK,” Terry said, “Let’s get in out of the weather—I’ll send for Chinese, and we can talk this over.”
We sat down in a pair of overstuffed armchairs.
The lovely white cartons arrived, we plied our chopsticks, speaking little, eating much.
Terry produced two double coronas, black as the heart of a Mexican pimp, and splashed some Fernet-Branca into stemware.
Ah, Fernet, it smells like turpentine and looks like India ink until you acquire the taste for it, then you can savor the minty, funky magnificence of the stuff.
Absinthe has the reputation, but Fernet is my cordial of choice—unless I can get Green Chartreuse, which tastes like varnish, bug spray and acetone the first time around.
Absinthe is more like anise and rotten teeth—it’s 136 proof and has to be diluted, anyhow, so Pernod is a lot more pleasant, to my mind.
I drank a lot of Absinthe in Africa, and came to the conclusion that Pernod would do for me.
In Argentina, they mix Fernet with Coca-Cola, and that’s good for a hot night, but tonight, we took it neat.
Small talk, a few sips, about a half inch gone to ashes on our cigars, and Terry made a wry face and began his story as the liquor settled our Singapore noodles.
“The first time I saw that tombstone, I smelled this weird odor, and looked around.
“There was a crude clay pot full of this coarse incense—the smell was like spices, not sweet spices, but maybe like caraway, with an undertone of decay, there was a lot of it, must have been burning for hours, maybe even days.
“That was just about the only strange thing I saw that day.
“I still remember that day, the dry leaves chasing each other around the monuments, the Autumn light, all gold and glory, the tangled undergrowth at the edge of the woods, and the way there was always shadow there.
“I went out of the grounds, I was walking three miles or more every day, then, trying to tire myself out enough to get to sleep at night.
“You know how dull this town is, there’s nothing to do here, so I’d ramble around, missing Miranda, but too damn proud to call her.
“Next day, I went to talk to Rob Krakhauer, my gravedigger, and he told me about the strange things he’d seen there.
“Over the years he’d found skinned cats on the grave, frogs and toads nailed to upside down crosses and strange signs drawn out in some kind of powder—the pots of incense were regular occurrences—and a couple of times a year, there were the remains of fires.
“I don’t quite know what to make of it.”
“And I’m Mr. Weird?”
“Aren’t you? This is devilment, and I’d really like to find out what gives.”
“OK, bud row, Carnacki the Ghost-Breaker is on the job!”
“Who?”
“Never mind. I’ll do what I can.”
We talked about this and that for a while, had another drink and finished our cigars.
“Let me know what you find,OK,? There’s more to this story, but it’s not for tonight.”
“I’ll be in touch.”
I headed home—I guessed that Terry was lonesome, and wanted someone to pass the time with.
Lisa was sitting sideways on the floor, on a long body pillow, her head on my thigh.
I was on one end of the couch, the dogs had commandeered the rest of it.
“Dish, lover.” She said it eagerly, still a reporter in her heart, in her soul.
“Terry’s sort of a sad case.
“He still loves his wife, but he hasn’t seen her for more than a year—he just left, never even got his clothes, left his car with her and rode ol’ Peter Pan to York.
“He called Teddy to pick him up, and just sort of hid out like a shot dog for a couple of months, in his old room, still in shock.”
“What happened?”
“I think he was burned out, and trying to hang on at work—he finally retired—then he just sort of went to bits.
“Miranda tried to reach him, get him to take some help, but he just withdrew farther, pulling in on himself. . . .”
“I’ve seen you do that,” Lisa said, “It isn’t pretty, not one little bit—watching the man you love come apart.”
“I take some of those Kitty Droody Anti-Depressant tabs, sleep for a day, and it straightens me right out.”
“It’s still no fun to watch—at least you don’t do the denial thing.”
“I’ve lived with it too long, I can’t pretend it’s not there.
“Anyway, they started avoiding each other, she would go to the Country Club weekends, he moped around the house while she was working, then went out and moped somewhere else when she came home.”
“Moping is bad for a relationship,” Lisa said wisely.
“One day, he decided it was time for him to get some therapy, mend things with Miranda, maybe even start a second career, so he comes home, determined to set things right, and finds Miranda in bed with Mitzi Thatch, the tennis pro from the club.”
“Oh, God, not Mitzi Thatch!”
“You know her?”
“Lord, yes, when I was assigned to DC for two years, I used to bump into her all the time at the clubs—remember, lesbians are thin on the ground, no matter where you are—and with her killer bod, well, she’s hard to miss.
“She’s a real she-wolf, spots a vulnerable straight woman, cuts her out of the herd, has her way with her and moves on.”
“How was she?”
“Degrading. She’s a oncer.”
“So, Terry catches them in flagrente delicti, as ’twere, and takes a vanishing powder, goes home to Scotia, and then, Teddy drops dead from an aneurysm in the middle of of lunch.
“The estate settled quickly, no other heirs, and Terry just sort of took over Teddy’s life.
They were the same size, so he just started wearing his clothes, driving his car, and running the graveyards.”
“No word from Miranda in all this time?”
“Not a peep.”
“This Brenner is a mystery—you’d think that marker would be on postcards and such,” Lisa was looking thoughtful. “Maybe a trip to the Hysterical Society?”
“You might get an idea for another book.” I told her. “I’ll see what I can find, too, between us, he hasn’t got a Chinaman’s chance.”
But he was elusive.
Hints and clues, footnotes in old books, a brief record in the moldiest depths of the county courthouse—some mention of him in connection to the Conway Cabal, a public condemnation of his “traffickige withe ye darke powers” in a tattered old newspaper, that was what we found.
Until, at the library of the Franklin Institute, in among a number of vanity press books, and apparently mis-shelved a long time ago, I found The Great Cabal of 1777.
Written with the slavering zeal of a true crackpot, this forgotten screed—it still had the pasteboard pocket on the back cover, with it’s lined docket, and it had been checked out once in the near century it had spent there, and probably would have been pulped a long time ago had it not been mis-placed—set forth a version of the event so turgid and fraught with dark menaces that Horatio Gates came off as the American Guy Fawkes
“Gates, through the despicable mercenary Conway,” the author ranted, “employed the services of two foul and necromantic mountebanks, Mohias Dung and Mordecai Brenner to aid him.
“This pair of charlatans, deep dyed in sin and horrid crime, abused their privileges of free passage about the Headquarters and Congress to gather conspirators and carry information among sympathetic commanders—Mohias Dung was in charge of a loose group of Indian spies and informers, Brenner did some commerce in herbal cures, and worse . . . They were aided in this by Brenner’s mulatto wife Ezulie Brenner, who was said to be both beautiful and alluring, as well as skilled in the Black Arts. . . .”
Gotcha, Mordecai, thinks I.
I photocopied the relevant passages, and bid the book a fond farewell, doubtless it was headed for the fifty-cent bins at the next book sale.
Then I headed home.
“What a crazy story!” Lisa said—she’d managed to get some space on the couch, and the dogs were dozing on the pillow—“It’s like what the old hands said about Saigon in the war, same snake-pit vibe.”
“Conway was unhappy because he thought his status as a regular should have counted for more—he thought the Continentals were just raggedy-ass militia, Gates was vain and ambitious, Lee was a jerk and some of the others were tired of losing battles.
“Washington knew that the war was damned expensive for the Crown—and that if the Colonials lost they’d be treated like the Scots after the ’45 Rising, so he stuck to a strategy of attrition, it cost the British more to win than it cost the colonials to lose, but a big defeat would be the end.
“Besides, when you have a provisional government, the lines of authority get blurred—I saw that in Africa, too many times, and some people decide they can just grab power.”
“Then the French stepped in.” Lisa agreed, “and that was it for the British.”
“There could have been a coup, but Lafayette got wise, and it fell apart.”
“This Conway must have been a peach.”
“He was a competent soldier, but he had a big mouth and too much ego—after he got squeezed out of the Army, he hung around blackguarding Washington, until one of the Generals called him out and shot him in the mouth.
“He thought he was going to die, and he wrote a very contrite apology to Washington.
“He lived, though, and went back to France, was appointed to a high command in India, in fact he was Governor of the French territory there, and got the stuffing beaten out of him fighting the Revolutionaries.
“He retired to Ireland—he was born there—and died around 1800.”
“Colorful life.”
“Yeah,” I said, “I can sort of identify with the guy.”
“He had Mohias Dung on his payroll?”
“And this Brenner guy.” I said.
“I’m working on that.” Lisa said.
One afternoon, I went by the graveyard, to look at the stone.
I found a ring of black candles arranged around the grave, a dark bloodstain and the tiny, inert body of a stillborn child.
A quick look around revealed the prints of naked feet .
I’d heard of this ceremony—it meant that a woman had lain nude on that grave, in the darkness and the chill, and after hours of suffering, given birth to a corpse.
I went off to find Rob Krakhauer—better for him to report it.
After all the rannygazoo at the scene was over—at least for us, we retired to the equipment shed where Rob had a pint of Jim Beam.
We each got a knock, and sat down by the heater to warm up.
“Bad business,” Krakhauer said, “I’ve been doing this work for a long time, and it’s not all beehives and wild flowers, I can tell you that.
“Graveyards draw bad people and bad things, and a big one like this has a strong draw.”
Rob wiped at his nose with a half full mitten—he had lost the fingers on his right hand to a farm machine in his youth.
“The Old Man—Denny—he needed someone who could dig, when he started this, and being shy most of a hand, I had to take what work I could get, so I turned grave digger.
“I remember those boys growing up, and Teddy took to the trade right away, too damn much.
“No way to say it nice, Teddy was a necrophiliac—yeah, a dumb shovel driver like me knows a few long words—he spent way too much time around that part of the operation, even when he was a kid.
“He got worse after Denny died and he took over, after Terry was gone—he’d have long house parties, expensive cars with out of state plates, that sort of thing, I knew something was going on.
“But I looked away, and I kept my mouth shut.
“But after Teddy died, and Terry was living in the big house, I get a call one night from Terry, he wants me there, and in a hurry.
“Seems he went town in the basement for some paper towels—never been down there before, and then went looking around.
“Like I said, I been doing this for a long time—but I wasn’t quite ready for what I saw.
“It was in the old root cellar, only it was all fixed up there, like a cross between a church and a whorehouse, and there was a platform.
“Tessie Kimmel was about the prettiest girl this town ever saw—Homecoming Queen, some modeling jobs in York—she died suddenly, heart defect she’d had since she was born, and she was buried here.
“Well, she had a grave here.
“You could still recognize her, sort of, embalming can only do so much, and well, I told you, I been doing this a while, so I looked between her legs and found one of them pocket pussies, like the perverts beat their dummies with, shoved up inside her.
“She was supposed to have been three years in the ground.
“Now, this story woulda done no good for anyone, if it got out, everybody was dead, or better off not knowing, like Tessie’s dad, her mom was long gone, and it just wasn’t going to make anything better, telling.
“We most always have a grave open somewhere in the complex, and I had just opened a place for old Lottie Enzminger—she was shipped in from a home in Ohio, nobody close was going to be there, if anybody was at all.
“So we got that thing that used to be poor Tessie into the service wagon, I took the grave down a couple of feet, Tessie was a tiny thing, and covered her over.
“Next morning, the vault was delivered, and I made sure it went in right over Tessie—she’s safe now.”
Rob took a long pull at the bottle.
“I never did a double decker, before, though there’s plenty who have, at least it was in a good cause.”
I declined the offered flask—one a day was my limit, though I might have found another pull welcome.
“I think I need a walk, after that story.” I told Krakhauer.
“I’ll make do with the rest of this jug.” Rob said, “Nothing much to do this afternoon, anyhow—I had to glue that damn ventilation grate back into the Mausoleum, vandals pry it out, trying to get inside.”
I walked across the grounds, nothing like a bone yard on a gray day to make you even more unhappy, and passed the yellow crime scene tape around the grave.
Somehow, I knew this wasn’t the first crime to transpire there.
A gust took my hat.
It flew into a dry tangle of dead winter bush, at the border of the cemetery.
When I went to retrieve it, I saw a trail, the bush cunningly concealed it, and most of the year, you’d never be able to spot it.
I made a mental note to see where it went, earlier in the day, and with my hiking boots and jeans on, no way I was going to risk my clothes to those thorns and burdocks.
“Mordecai Brenner has a googleganger!” Lisa said, that night.
“No way!” I said, as I kissed her on the neck.
“Way!” she said, “Ooh, that felt good, do it again.”
“Want a hickey?”
“Why not?, it’s turtleneck weather.”
I teased her a bit, then asked, “What did you find?”
“In 1638, a man named Mordecai Brenner had the fingers of his right hand cut off in Magdeburg, for witchcraft, and was condemned to be chased through the streets until he died.”
“So much for him.”
“Maybe not,” she said quietly. “According to the old accounts, the mob started running him, then got all confused and started chasing each other, they never did find his body.”
“I found something odd at the cemetery—I’ll tell you and the doggies all about it. . . .”
Lisa stuck a finger in her mouth, “Oooh, dwaddy, widdle Wisa wubs stories!”
The little witch sat on my lap and sucked her thumb while I brought her up to date.
“Yucky!” she said, “Dwaddy scare widdle Wisa with a nasty story,” she stood up, stretched, and resettled beside me. “I want to go with you when you follow that trail, might be interesting.”
“I think we’ll take the dogs, too.”
“And our pistols, lover, these expeditions tend to get crazy.”
“Boy, howdy!” I said.
It was a while before I got to follow that trail.
A serial killer with a linoleum knife and a serious case of magical thinking was making occult symbols in innocent blood in Cincinnati—so off I went for advisory duty with the FBI VICAP team.
This gazooney was a lot more knowledgeable than the usual paperback and tarot card necromancer—in fact, he had achieved the first level of power, and was moving up quickly.
I had to hunt the dirt bag, and keep the Fee-bees from finding out what was really going on, and when Lloigor manifested in response to the blood sacrifice, I had to sail mighty thefty to keep everything quiet and put this weirdo down.
Cultists are rarely taken alive—this one was just another loser who found out that the Powers have no loyalty to humans, ever.
A man with his head twisted off is hard to explain—somebody in the Cincinnati PD was a very creative sort of person.
So, after three months in Ohio, I returned home, rested for a few days, and then took Lisa, the dogs and myself to investigate the trees behind that lonely grave.
The copse was no more than a quarter mile wide, it ended abruptly at a lightly traveled secondary road, and it followed the border of the graveyard like a gerrymandered electoral district.
It was one of those mini-wildernesses, a place where nobody went—Rob Krakhauer told me the kids didn’t even play Army in there.
So why was there a trail, trampled smooth and bare, leading into it?
The dogs stopped frisking, and went on alert as soon as we went into the trees.
Lisa and I made sure our guns were clear to draw.
“Damn, lover, I do _not_ like this place!” Lisa said.
We found out why, after we’d hiked about two hundred yards—the trail ended in a clearing—and came upon a small henge with an altar.
The dogs growled and whimpered as they sniffed.
Blood, probably human, and lots of it.
“This isn’t right!” Lisa said, “nobody knows this is here?”
“There’s no mention of it in the local legends—and this is a superstitious place.”
“Look how the legend of Toad Road hangs on,” she said, “That’s total bollocks, but it’s never dies out. ”
“The story is true enough.” I told her, “only it didn’t happen around here, it was the old Byberry Asylum outside of Philadelphia, burned down with inmates inside, supposed to be haunted.”
“Is it?”
“Yeah.”
We found the three crescents, interlocking inside a circle, roughly chiseled into a stone block.
“Fancy that.” Lisa said ironically, “Shub-Niggurath.”
I gingerly touched the surface of the altar.
The blood felt fresh.
The dogs were raising Hell—of course, we found the body of a young woman, frozen solid by the winter, and just beginning to thaw.
There was another one so fresh it hadn’t even begun to smell, yet, but the dogs found it easily.
While we were trekking to the shed to tell Rob Krakhauer about this new bit of business, we met Ronny Fake, one of the grounds crew.
“Looking for Rob?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Best put them dogs up, then, dogs purely hate him, I don’t know why.”
I sent Lisa home with the mutts, no reason for her to have to answer all those questions if she didn’t have to.
They strung the yellow tape, and the forensics team from the State Police arrived a bit later.
It hurt me to tell all those lies.
They let me go pretty quickly, I didn’t have much to tell them—and they only asked Lisa a few quick questions when she arrived to pick me up.
She stuck to the bare bones.
We were home in time to grab a cold supper and hit the sack.
I managed to get my hands on that book in Philadelphia—the librarian seemed to be glad to sell it to me for twenty bucks.
Plus postage.
It arrived promptly enough, and I tore off the red,white and blue flat rate carton in a hurry.
I’d no more than skimmed it, that day, looking for information I wanted, right then.
But my trick memory told me there was something I’d dismissed at the time.
So I read it carefully, this time, and on page 489, I discovered this tidbit.
“Mordecai Brenner was a man locally admired as a purveyor of herb cures and an astrologer, among other, darker things.
“Some believed that Brenner had been hired to poison Washington, or put a curse on him.
“He is described as a big man, who dressed in a shabby-genteel style, and it was noted that he was left handed, having lost the fingers of his right hand, as he told it, in a backsword duel.
“His wife, Ezulie, was an octaroon from Jamacia, noted, however, for her grace, beauty and charming wit, and a great favorite around the town. . . .”
None of my data bases had any mention of her, though, all I could find was reference to Voudon loa of sex and sensuality by that name.
I revisited the ring of standing stones, found nothing, passed by the Brenner grave, and still found nothing.
Except another pot of that incense, glowing a hellish, dull red as an April breeze passed across it.
Wednesday night, Lisa and I went to Terry’s house for pot roast.
In the District,Terry was a well known amateur chef—so we sat down, with an appetite.
And the doorbell rang.
Lisa was closer, so she opened the door.
And in came Miranda.
Terry was gobsmacked.
“Terry!” she said, “I’ve been worried sick—why didn’t you call me?”
“I didn’t think you’d want to hear from me.” He sounded bitter.
“Oh, honey!” she said, starting to cry. “Can’t you forgive me?”
“Miranda, you have no idea how much that hurt.”
“It was just that one time, Terry, my God, I was so lonely and you were gone from me, then Mitzi was so nice. . . .”
“At least she was nice.”
“She made a fool out of me, Terry, it was sweaty and nasty and I felt like I had been rolling in filth!”
“That’s Mitzi all over.” Lisa said sotto voce.
“I’ve been dying for some of your pot roast, sweetie, and I drove all the way from the District on an empty stomach, will you at least feed me before I go back.”
“Do you want to go back tonight?” Teddy said.
“No, Terry, I don’t, I just want you back.”
“I’ll set you a place.” he told her.
We ate and ran, and they were at each other like ferrets before we were in our car.
Lisa was weeping like a cheese, “I love happy endings!” she snuffled.
Walpurgis Night, and I was in the cemetery.
Just imagine.
I was standing in some shadows when Rob Krakhauer came down the hill.
“Hello, Mordecai,” I said.
He looked at me.
“Busted!” he said, with a laugh.
“Want to tell me the story?”
“Not really.”
“How old are you?”
“Too old—I’m tired of this stuff, I just want some peace.”
“Who’s in the grave?”
“Ezulie—Mohias killed her—look, this ceremony only works once in a while, and it’ll be a long time before I can do it again, so just let me raise her, and I’m gone.”
“Not a shot—and Lisa is up the hill with the dogs and her shotgun, I’m heeled, too.”
“I’m minded to take my chances.”
“If you feel froggy, jump.”
“I’ve waited so long—have a heart?”
“I can send you to her.”
“Don’t like that idea.” he said.
His face crumpled.
“How did you figure it out?” he asked me.
“The ’net gets more comprehensive every day, more data bases, more books scanned into the systems.
“You’re no secret, not any more, and I had a little luck.”
“No such thing as luck, not in these matters—I really need to find out how to work one of those computers, too.”
“It’s a little late for that.”
“Short shrift, is it?”
“Sorry.”
“Been a good long time, I shouldn’t complain, but will you do it on her grave? My blood can run down to her, we can be together that way.”
“I’m going to have to destroy your body.”
“You know too much,” he grumbled. “Then let’s do it.”
He walked to the grave, and stood on it.
I slipped my Taurus nine millimeter out, and cocked the hammer.
“I don’t want to see it coming, all right?”
He put his left hand over his eyes, and I raised my gun.
He made a complicated gesture, and the world did a fast kaleidoscope spin—he set off down the trail to the henge at a dead run.
I yelled, and Lisa loosed the dogs, she followed them with her Superposed Browning at the ready.
It took me a second or two to shake the nausea and disorientation from that Working, so I followed the dogs down the trail.
They were lusting for a fight, and they went swiftly.
But when we all reached that circle of standing stones, he was gone.
There was a strange feeling there, like you get right after an explosion or a violent event.
That stillness. That sense of energy in the calm, aftermath, a humming you can’t quite hear.
He was utterly gone—perhaps to search for Mohias Dung and claim his revenge.
I can’t say I don’t wish him luck. |
|
|
