Ghost Mortem (Bordertown Chronicle Book 1) Page 12

  I sidled over to the other side of the car, getting myself and the girl in my arms away from the blue, glowing spectral emanation cloud which swirled about, shrieking obscenities. It looked like it was trying to regain some kind of shape, but seemed unable to do so. A sound like a string of muffled profanities, or perhaps demonic backwards talk, spilled out of the swirling cloud.

  “Jack!” Vikki shouted. “P.K. imploder.”

  “The what-now?”

  “One of the grenade things on your belt.”

  “Oh, right.”

  My dad pitched one of the grenades out.

  Vikki called out to us. “Gavin, cover your ears.”

  I covered my ears. I looked at the girl, now sitting in my lap, gawking back at me, disoriented and confused. I quickly took my hands off my ears, and placed her hands on her ears. Thankfully, she had the sense to keep there. I got her to close her eyes, and then I covered my ears and closed my eyes.

  Then I heard a muffled and somewhat inverted suction sound. I opened one eye to see what looked like a tiny black hole swallowing the emanation as it swirled in toward it, dancing and screaming, like I suppose one does when getting sucked into a black hole. It looked a bit like a small, man-sized quasar.

  This had an effect on the little girl too. She seemed to grow scared and started crying and clinging to me tightly. She screamed painfully close to my ear, which I managed to cover with my hand once I could slip my arm out and around her.

  Finally, the swirling stopped, and the girl managed to calm down, and for a refreshing moment, the neighborhood seemed relatively quiet, save for the car alarm still sounding in the car ahead of us.

  “Everyone okay in there?” said Vikki.

  “We’re good,” I said, giving a thumbs up. “And what’s more. I stayed in the car. I stayed in the car, and I helped.”

  “Congratulations, son,” said dad. “You get a gold star.”

  “And you,” I said. “Next time you use one of those thingies, you have to say 'Yippie ki-yay, sucker!' Just like Bruce Willis in that movie.”

  Vikki laughed.

  “Motherfucker,” said my dad.

  “What did you just call me?”

  “I'm not calling you…ugh. Gavin, if you're going to reference Die Hard, at least get the line right. It's 'yippie ki-yay, motherfucker.'”

  “Right. I knew that. Ugh,” I said, still tasting the yellowish, grainy residue inside my mouth. “I can still taste puke. Ugh…what is that? Banana candies? I think you need a change of diet, little girl.”

  I took one look at her little face. She looked like she was about ready to cry.

  “Aw, hey…” I said. “It's okay, sweetie. You're going to be okay. Let's get you inside.”

  Chapter 24

  Once the girl was calm, we took her inside, where she promptly dove into her mother's arms. I've got to admit, it put kind of a smile on my face. For the first time in like, well, ever, I felt like I'd actually done some good in the world, even if it had resulted in a mouthful of grossness. And a slightly bruised pair of nads. I suppose it's true what they say; no good deed goes unpunished.

  “Do you mind if I use your washroom?” I asked the girl's mother.

  “Of course,” she said. “Just up the stairs and to your right.”

  I headed up the stairs and quickly ransacked the washroom for any kind of mouthwash I could find. I lucked out and found an industrial-sized bottle of Listerine Antiseptic. I spent the next five minutes gargling the taste out, and doing what I could to get the chucks of semi-digested candies and…other things I couldn't quite identify—and quite frankly didn't want to—out of my hair and shirt.

  “Everything all right in there?” called the mother from just outside the door.

  “Yeah, sorry, I'll be right out,” I said.

  I pulled my shirt back on and headed back downstairs.

  When I got there, I'd expected Vikki and Jack to be ready to go, but then I found Vikki had been entertaining the little girl while Jack was outside, apparently vacuuming the inside of the squad car. Frankly, it probably needed it. I, in turn, was in need of a well-deserved smoke. I turned to head outside when Vikki called to me.

  “Hey, hero,” she said.

  And not in an ironic way. At least, it didn't sound like mockery to me. I liked the way it sounded when she called me that. It was like she was actually impressed by what I'd done. I couldn't help but smile warmly to myself before turning around.

  “Hey yourself,” I said.

  “I think someone wants to thank you,” she said

  She looked back at the little girl.

  “Mister, thank you for helping me get that mean ghost out of me,” the little girl said.

  It was an adorable little voice. It sounded far more appropriate for her age, gender and size than the previous had. I gathered she was getting back to normal.

  “You're welcome, sweetie,” I replied.

  “I made you somefing.”

  The girl stood and came towards me, holding a plate with a sandwich on it.

  “Oh,” I said, “wow, thank you. Is this for me?”

  “Uh-huh,” she said with an enthusiastic nod.

  She handed it to me.

  “Don't mind if I do,” I said.

  Without hesitation, I bit into the thing.

  There is not enough mouthwash in the world for this, was the first thing that entered my mind. But then I looked at her eager face as she watched me eat it. So eager to please me.

  “Do you like it?” she asked.

  I chewed carefully. It was damn near sugar-coma-inducingly sweet. Honest-to-god tears began to form in my eyes.

  “Are you okay?” she continued.

  “It's…ugh…so…sweet…it…just brings tears to my eyes. Thank you, sweetie…”

  Behind her, Vikki was trying to stifle a laugh.

  I managed to gulp down the first bite of it, which almost made me gag. Somehow, I choked it down with a shudder.

  “What's in this, anyway?” I asked.

  She recited the ridiculous recipe proudly.

  “Pastrami, and cheddar cheese, and brown sugar, and gummy worms, and chocolate syrup, and banana candies…”

  Of course…banana candies…the bane of my existence…that was why, on top of being cloyingly sweet, the sandwich had the bonus effect of reminding of that time not that long ago when a possessed girl barfed in my mouth.

  I promptly put the sandwich down.

  “You're not going to have any more of it?”

  “It's…uh…” I stammered.

  I looked into the little girl's watery eyes, brimming with an ungodly eagerness to please me, almost on the verge of tears again.

  “It's so good…” I continued, “I can't just eat it all at once. Is there any way I could pack it up and take it with me so I can enjoy the rest of it later?”

  “Okay,” she replied cheerfully and got a piece of Tupperware from the kitchen. I scowled at Vikki, who scarcely noticed. Now she seemed to be in stitches, her face red, burying her face in her hand laughing.

  When the little girl came back, I was already halfway up the stairs again.

  “Where are you going?” she said.

  “Sorry, I just remembered I needed to use the washroom quickly again…for some reason.”

  I heard a roar of laughter come from both Vikki and the girl's mother before closing the door. I poured myself another capful of Listerine to gargle away the taste.

  Finally, with the car clean, and my mouth clean, again, we bid farewell to the family. I tried to accidentally forget about the Tupperware-packed sandwich, but the girl just wasn't having it. She made sure I remembered.

  “You can bring the container back later and I'll make you another one,” the little monster effervesced.

  “I seriously can't wait,” I said. “I think I'm shuddering with anticipation.”

  With that, we left, and got back into the police cruiser.

  “If I never eat another banana ca
ndy again it'll be too soon,” I said, once we were a safe distance away. “Maybe we can stop by the Heaven-Eleven and arrest a few bags of them for impersonating food.”

  In front, Vikki and Jack just laughed and laughed.

  Chapter 25

  It was mid-day when our cruiser pulled into the courthouse parking lot.

  “What are we doing now?” I asked as we got out of the cruiser.

  “We have to process our perp,” said Vikki, “and that means our little hungry ghost here has to appear before the Oversoul.”

  “I'm sorry. The Over-who?”

  Vikki sighed. “The Oversoul is the highest ranking spirit official in the district. Every district has one. Ours is Judge Hawthorne.”

  “And so…he just judges? Like the way a normal judge would judge?”

  “No. Not like a normal judge. Things are different in the spirit world. You’ll see. But generally, the dead don’t pass judgment on the living, and the living don’t pass judgment on the dead. But of course, that doesn’t mean we don’t get to catch them,” she said, with perhaps a little too much mischief in her eyes.

  The courthouse, which had looked massive from the outside, had turned out only to have four courtrooms in it. Three of the courtrooms looked more or less like the conventional courtrooms we have back in Regina. One was small, with a TV screen for people in the jail below to call up to the courtroom. Of the two mid-sized courtrooms, one was for 'humans' and the other for 'demi-humans', which apparently included vampires, werewolves, incubi and succubi—that kind of thing.

  “Incubi and succubi?” I asked. “What do they get in trouble for? Wait. Let me guess. Prostitution?”

  “Prostitution's not illegal here.”

  “It's not?”

  “No. So usually with incubi and succubi it’s more like public indecency. They usually aren’t charged with much else, since a single touch from one of them usually just gives you a strong, almost irresistible urge to fuck,” she said.

  The way she said the word ‘fuck’ gave me the irresistible urge to fuck. Her. Now. I just wanted to fuck the bejesus out of the beautiful blonde before me. How the hell was I going to maintain my composure long enough to get to the bottom of this case? It seemed like the more time I spent with Vikki, the more the attraction started getting to me.

  “Have you ever been touched by an incubus? Or a succubus?” I asked.

  “Wouldn’t you like to know,” she smiled.

  Oh, gosh yes. So…so badly.

  Vikki guided us to the largest courtroom. It was huge, and covered with ornate stained glass windows, depicting all manner of vivid spiritual imagery: ghosts swirling around one another like a yin-yang, ghosts tending to the sick and bedridden, and ghosts ascending through corridors of light into the sky.

  “This place looks like a giant church,” I said.

  “It is a church,” Vikki said. “Or at least it was, up until 1955, when Bordertown joined Intersoul.”

  “I'm sorry…inter-soul?” I asked.

  “Yeah, Intersoul. Gavin, have you seriously not bothered to read the town charter? Aren’t you supposed to be a journalist now? You should really know these things.”

  “Yeah, yeah, so I've heard. I’ll get to it.”

  Vikki, my father and I sat in the courtroom and waited in the pews. A few minutes later, all the doors snapped shut. Eerie black smoke began to swirl around us, stopping, seemingly of its own volition around our ankles, and crawling up into the jury box by the front of the room like a creeping cloud. A willowy feminine shadow emerged in the background by the organ and began to play.

  “What the hell's going on?” I whispered.

  “Just relax,” whispered Vikki. “Court’s in session.”

  “You mean it’s always like this?”

  “These days, pretty much, yeah.”

  The black smoke began to pool in the juror’s box. Out of the dark cloud arose twelve thin, humanoid figures. To describe them as human, wouldn’t quite do them justice. They looked almost human, perhaps the way a human adult might look if you skinned him, and then somehow tanned the muscle underneath into leather. They all appeared to be tethered to the floor, and to one another somehow; their muscle tissue seamlessly merged with each other at the waist. The black smoke rose and culminated in a column behind the podium at the front of the courtroom. The column began to dissipate and behind it, coming into focus was a robed figure, not entirely unlike a judge, but not entirely like a judge either. The impressive figure must have been at least eight feet tall, and carried a scythe with it, held by a skeletal hand. The face was obscured by the hood of the robe completely.

  I peered directly at the Oversoul's face. Or at least, I tried to. I saw no face. I saw only a dark abyss there. But it wasn't just darkness. It's hard to explain, but there was also a feeling emanating from that darkness. I felt…I don’t know. I felt like I was staring into the face of pure fear. I’m not sure I can do it justice, so to speak. But staring into the face of death, well…it was a bit like that feeling of almost falling off a high-rise. It's that knowledge that you came so close to death, and the knowledge that this exact same feeling will be waiting patiently to come back for you someday. And that eventually, no matter what you do, no matter how far you run, one day, you’re going to find yourself on the wrong end of this scythe. That’s how it felt, staring up into the blackness under the hood where a face should be.

  “All rise,” came a low voice from nowhere in particular.

  And, as people do in church when someone says 'rise', we rose.

  “The Oversoul is now residing.” The same voice said. “You may be seated.”

  We all sat back down. I felt a chill come over me. The courtroom became completely silent. I found myself trying to pop my eardrums, the way one does when going up in an airplane or an elevator too quickly, just to test them and see if they were still working. I didn’t dare make a sound.

  I almost jumped when I heard a deep booming voice, which seemed to echo and reverberate inside my head.

  “Bailiff, do thou bring forth the first defendant,” said the Oversoul.

  A clerk nodded to my dad. He turned to Vikki. She nodded back to him and looked towards his belt. Dad pulled out the grenade he’d thrown earlier—the PK imploding whatjamacallit—and handed it to the clerk. The clerk placed the grenade inside a circle of salt another servant poured in the center of the room, and pressed the release button.

  The purple spirit swirled out of his prison. He began swirling in the air, shrieking like a mad monkey as he tried to regain some kind of shape. When he did begin to form a semblance of a humanoid form, he looked a bit like a rotund Buddha statue. I couldn’t tell if that was the way this spirit had always looked, or if being forced into this ball-shaped device, or else if years of sedentary neglect had left him more ball-shaped than man-shaped. Maybe in life he’d just been a great big fat guy. After all, from what I remembered about that possessed girl, she had seemed to have a tipsy, waddly gate, as only the morbidly obese do.

  “I do beseech thou give the court thy name,” said the Oversoul.

  Is he seriously speaking in iambic pentameter? I wondered to myself. It was so…I don't know…old school. But, like, hardcore Shakespearean old school.

  I turned to Vikki to make a joke. But then, seeing her facing forward, I thought maybe that wasn't the most appropriate idea. So I didn't. Instead, I turned back to watch the defendant's response.

  The naked fat figure in the salt circle made a series or rude gestures with his hands too crude for me to accurately describe. He proceeded to shake his enormous penis at the judge. Then he turned, spread his butt cheeks, bent over further, spread his butt cheeks more and more, until out came a subtle, almost decadent little toot-sound, followed by an honest-to-god, brown, fudge-dragon, which, in turn, gave the judge the raspberry with its own forked, serpentine tongue, before it finally got too long to hold its erect shape, deflated like a limp penis and then fell face first to the ground, where it
coiled around and around as it continued to pour out of the fat ghost, as if its ass was some kind of god-damned chocolate ice cream dispenser!

  “Let our court records show that the defendant did not wish to be identified.”

  One of the clerks nodded, and wrote down this apparently important fact with his quill and inkwell.

  “Thou standest charged with living child possession, damage to a household in excess of five-and-twenty hundred thousand dollars, vandalism to police property, and resisting lawful arrest. How pleadest thou?”

  The fat ghost puffed up his voluptuous chest and stood proud, as prostrate as his squat body could. A fountainous, golden arc flew through the air, towards the judge. The stream didn't reach the judge, but instead fell back downwards about halfway between the podium and the salt circle. If the ghost had had wings, he might have look like one of those peeing, childlike cherub statues you see in…places that apparently like that sort of thing, like they're some kind of Epicurean wonderland.

  “'Tis well. I find thee guilty on all charges. And furthermore, I find thee guilty of contempt of court. 'Tis fitting thus to have thy sentence carried out forthwith.”

  Without warning, the judge somersaulted into the air, perhaps halfway towards the several-stories-tall inner archways of the church, and then swooped down toward the fat ghost with demonic speed.

  The Oversoul’s scythe was almost invisible as it traveled through the air, and materialized back in his hand. The slash was terrifyingly swift.

  The portly ghost began to glow in a line through his midsection, and then, at a 45 degree angle, his top half slid off him and into a heap on the ground, right next to his coiled, serpentine excrement. The fallen half of him slowly opened his mouth and began to shriek.

  “Oh my god,” I blurted.

  It was quite loud, and quite by accident. I covered my mouth. Everyone in the courtroom seemed to stare at me, though only half of the stares seemed to suggest I’d made some kind of social transgression. The other half were a mix of empty stares from the jury, like they were all dead inside, (which they presumably were), and Vikki’s look, which bore more the air of I know, right? My father’s look…well, I think he was the only person in the room who felt as shocked as I did. Maybe this was justice in the spirit world, but it looked pretty fucking terrifying to us living creatures. I'll tell you that.