Ghost Mortem (Bordertown Chronicle Book 1) Read online

  My dad shook his head. “They gave me specific directions. But they don't make sense. I mean—here—look at this,” he said, handing me his palm pilot. “When you get to the annex, turn left, then straight. Then right, then straight. Then right, then straight, then left, then straight. But…” he threw up his hand in annoyance. “But that basically means I'm going straight, doesn't it? I mean, what is this, the Konami code?”

  “Dad, what the hell is the Konami code?”

  “Gavin, are you serious? Don't you play, like, eight hours of video games a day? Do you…do you kids not know anything about the classics?”

  “Well, what I know is how to use Google maps, and if you get specific directions you should probably follow them.”

  “Don't be a smart-ass.”

  I threw up my own hands in defiance.

  “Fine,” said my dad. “I'll just follow the damn directions. Can't believe I'm doing this but we've passed the annex three times. We should be at the border by now. Where the hell is the border?”

  My dad proceeded to drive angrily, making exaggerated turns at each intersection.

  “Dad…” Raven protested, looking up momentarily from her phone.

  Dad sighed and slowed a little.

  “Is there even, like, going to be anything to do there?” asked Raven.

  “I’m sure there is, sweetie,” dad said. “You know, they have a mall, where you can hang out and get arts supplies and more piercings or whatever. Of course my first order of business as a deputy there is going to be to tell them not to let you. And no tattoos either.”

  My sister didn’t reply, but she didn’t have to. The seething cauldron of resentment inside her practically boiled over.

  “What’s the population there anyway,” I asked, “like six thousand?”

  That’s me, by the way, the 23-year-old ruggedly handsome guy with the brown faux-hawk in the passenger side. I’m playing Pokémon GO on my phone because apparently I'm also twelve.

  “It's more like sixty-six thousand,” he said

  “Oh. Pardon me then. That’s a bustling metropolis.”

  Dad sighed in lieu of an answer.

  “What I want to know is,” I continued, “are there going to be any girls there? Like, am I going to have to choose between, like, the only two girls in town? And one of them has a harelip, and the other has a big collection of shotguns and hunting trophies. And a dad that’s even bigger and scarier than you are.”

  “Gavin,” my dad started, “maybe if don’t go through, like, every girl you find on J-date in the first week, maybe you can make it last a bit longer.”

  “Pff, you’re just jealous,” I said. “And no one uses J-date anymore. No one under twenty-five, anyway.”

  “If you don’t like it, Gavin,” my father said slowly and low. “Then maybe you should have found yourself a job, right? Am I right? See, most men your age, they do this thing where they go out, and they get jobs, so they aren’t forced to move to the middle of nowhere with their fathers, whom their spoiled little douche-asses resent while they continue to live with them, rent-free. You could easily get a job, couldn’t you, Gavin? There was a civilian position on the force I was telling you about. Did you follow that up? I know it’s not glamorous, but you gotta start somewhere. You could at least try. Am I right, Gavin? I’m right, aren’t I? Gavin, get a job.”

  I don’t exactly growl, per se, but every time my dad uses the whole jobless thing like it’s some kind of blunt instrument to beat me over the head with, I kind of want to deck him. And then I wonder if the only thing stopping me is looking over at him and thinking: damn, my dad is huge!

  “You know what, dad? You big…dumb…jerky…jerk-ass. You know how many damned interviews I’ve had to go through? The problem isn’t that I don’t try. It’s that no one’s hiring. You think I choose to be jobless because chicks dig it? Or because I like watching your uvula flap while you blast me with your stinky middle-age man-breath.”

  Then my dad turned his bald head way, his face red with fury.

  “You know what, Gavin? You know what you are? You…you're a lazy, free-loading, ungrateful piece of—”

  “Dad, watch the road,” Raven screeched.

  My dad nearly swerved off the road, and came to a grinding halt as a deer stopped, staring at our oncoming car.

  Raven, now in tears, began screaming from the back seat.

  “For fuck sake, shut up, both of you! Dad, why can’t you, like, just keep your god damned eyes on the road?”

  Dad glared at me, and then back at Raven. His eyes softened.

  Raven scratched idly at the stump just above where her left elbow used to be. It seems to itch twice as badly whenever we fight around her. Or when the weather's bad. It wasn’t very difficult for my dad and me to quickly snap out of fight mode when we looked back at her.

  Raven is a constant living reminder of what happened to all of us five years ago. Dad and I have the luxury of occasionally forgetting about that one fateful night. The night of the bad car accident. The night we lost mom. But there’s probably never a moment like that for Raven. She has to live every moment, from now until the bitter end of her life with that mangled arm, or lack thereof, which she claims itches almost constantly. Sometimes, I’ll find her balled up in a corner somewhere in tears, and she’ll tell me the phantom limb pain is so bad she doesn’t know what to do. Then my dad or I will go and get her an aspirin or two and just sit with her and let her vent, or maybe do some venting of our own to get her mind off the subject, if only temporarily.

  It’s times like this, when we find ourselves temporarily forgetting what happened five years ago, only to remember again all-too-vividly, that we realize—even though we all got it kind of bad that October day, driving home from the synagogue—sis got the worst of it. Counting those of us still living, anyway. Mom, the one driving, was killed instantly. Normally, it would have been dad driving, but he got too drunk that night. For years afterward, he'd blame himself for that, even though we all know it wasn't his fault. It was his daughter's bat mitzvah, after all. That's what we were driving home from: the after party of my sister’s bat mitzvah. Then, in the dead of night, in the heavy rain, my mom suddenly, and without warning, steered the car into the oncoming lane. Dad had started screaming at my mom, who’d simply stopped responding. Dad tried to pull us back in apparently, but was a little too slow. The truck coming from the other direction sheered off the left side of our car almost completely, and took my little sister’s forearm with it, before our car careened off the road and into a huge oak tree, where we all lost consciousness for a little while. I know I did anyway, and while I was out, I'd swear I saw the Grim Reaper hovering above us, cackle and say:

  “Congratulations on the bat mitzvah, bitch. You're a woman. Now die!”

  Yeah, the Grim Reaper was weirdly callous and rude in this nightmare. Maybe he always is. After all, no one’s ever happy to see him. So who could blame him?

  Oh, wait. I can.

  My sister was only thirteen at the time. In her bat mitzvah speech, I remember her saying something about being ready to take on being an adult, and feeling ready for the realities of life. But I think this was too much reality for one night. She’d just had a fun party, with all her friends. Raven used to have so many friends. She became a completely different person after the accident. Maybe she’d had a bit too much to drink that night. She had her arm out the window. She was just laughing, catching the rain. I remember thinking she should probably not do that. But fuck it; this was her bat mitzvah! Let her have this last, simple, childish pleasure.

  All that innocence is gone now.

  “I'm sorry, Raven,” my dad muttered. “And…Gavin, I'm sorry too. It's late. I'm tired, and I just want to get to Bordertown.”

  “I'm sorry too,” I said to him, then I turned to Raven. “I'm sorry, Raven.”

  “It's fine,” she said. “Just…just stop fighting, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “W
hat's that deer doing?” asked Raven.

  We all looked ahead, at the deer. It looked spooked.

  My dad rolled down his window and gestured at it with his hands.

  “Hey, keep…keep moving.”

  Its ears perked up, but it didn't so much as look at us.

  I got out of the car and tried to startle to deer off the road.

  “Hey!” I shouted. “Go on! Get!”

  The deer looked my way, but didn't seem all that impressed. It looked spooked, but not by me.

  Its ears perked up. Like it could hear something in the distance, just beyond the trees.

  Then my ears perked up. I thought I heard something too. Something…oddly lupine.

  In the distance, I could hear the faint howling of a wolf. No…maybe a whole pack of them. And they seemed to be rapidly getting closer.

  “Gavin,” my dad said evenly. “Gavin, get back in the car.”

  I nodded, feeling somewhat like a doe in headlights myself now, moving back towards the car as movement disturbed the trees and bushes of the woods beside us.

  I got back into the car and slammed the door.

  The deer scuttled away into the woods to the other side of us.

  That's when we saw the group—the pack—emerge from the woods.

  They were not a pack of wolves, as I'd expected.

  They were a pack of people—mostly shirtless men—howling at the moon and then giving chase to the poor deer. There were two or three women among them too, including a really hot redhead in a sports bra. She did not escape my notice. She attracted my gaze for some reason.

  We, conversely, didn't escape their notice either. Most of them ignored us and continued on in pursuit of the fleeing deer. But a few of them stopped first to moon us in the moonlight.

  “Woo!” the shirtless men shouted, taking their pants down just enough to flash their hairy ass-cracks at us before proceeding on with the rest of the group into the woods.

  “Dad…” Raven started. “Where are we?”

  Chapter 4

  After driving for what must have been ten hours, and felt like ten days, we found ourselves passing a roadside sign which read “Welcome to Bordertown. Population: 66,000.” It was an old wooden sign, which looked like it had been xylographed three centuries ago. Except the sign looked fairly new, and the numbers “000” had been spray-painted over in red, and a third “6” had been added below.

  We drove under a large wooden archway, which simply read “Bordertown” and into a quiet little town which looked to be from another century. And possibly another continent. The homes here looked like those old buildings they make you huddle inside during those wilderness-orienteering classes they make you do in elementary school. You know, the ones where they want to show you first hand just how rough the pioneers had it, long before the modern age of smart phones, insulation, and toilet paper. And for some sadistic reason, they always do it in the middle of February. Like, right in the dead of winter. I’d always wondered what they must have been thinking when they first settled here—the pioneers, I mean—when winter set in. They arrived in summer. Summer changed to autumn. And then, it just got colder…and colder…and colder.

  I knew what one particular woman thought anyway, from my readings of Susanna Moodie’s Roughing it in the Bush. A title I still can’t say without my inner twelve-year-old snickering. You have to wonder about the level of intelligence of our pioneering European ancestors.

  “The British government,” Moodie explained, “advertised this new continent as a place of promise and wonder. Kind of the way a stranger shows up in a white van and promises a kid candy. Except now I’m at that awkward moment when I’m inside the van, they’ve locked the door, and I’m beginning to realize there is no candy. And no heating either.”

  Of course, I may be paraphrasing Moodie a bit. But you get the idea. That’s the foundation of Canada for you.

  We drove through the large, xylographed “Bordertown” archway and into the town. Off in the distance, I would swear I could make out some kind of castle at the top of a hill, with the moon in the backdrop. It towered over the rest of the town like you might imagine Dracula’s castle looming over a small, unsuspecting Transylvanian village. The town was like nothing that belonged in this country. Or in the States. Or on this century for that matter.

  “What is this place?” I said. “Dracula's Wonderland?”

  “This is Bordertown, kids,” my dad replied.

  Dad parked the car just outside the courthouse. It was this gargantuan, gothic monstrosity with two giant, freaky stone gargoyles in front of a giant set of steps. The stairs leading up to the courthouse may well have been taller than the homes surrounding it. Atop the steps, the two gargoyles seemed to guard either side: one a gryphon, and the other a three headed-dog. Cerberus, I presumed. The guardian at the gates of Hell. Both were on their hind legs and seemed on the verge of springing forth into action. They looked almost…alive. But maybe my mind was playing tricks on me. Like it so often does.

  Above the colossal entryway, which looked not entirely unlike what I imagine the pearly gates might look like, read the phrase “Veritas Aequitas et Omnia Monstra.” Latin wasn't exactly a priority for me in high school, or in university, or…ever for that matter, so I can't tell you what that means. But I think it has something to do with truth, justice and monsters.

  “This must be the place,” said my father.

  “Gee, you think?” I said.

  I gave my father, a big, shit-eating grin.

  This forced a begrudging grin from my tired father’s face in turn.

  “We’re not all going to get turned into vampires or something here, are we?” asked Raven.

  “No, Raven, I doubt it,” my dad said, adding with a sardonic smile, “sorry to disappoint you.”

  He headed inside. Raven followed.

  The plan was to collect our house-keys and “other important documents” from the courthouse, which apparently also doubled as the town’s police precinct, even at this ungodly hour.

  I decided I needed another smoke. I reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out my Zippo lighter. I rummaged for my pack of Marlboro Lights, which I then remembered was gone. Stolen away in the night by some creature from the netherworld with huge…well…nethers.

  I peered around the town and let my eyes take in its sights. Some of the old, cobblestone cottage-like homes had lights on. From a few of them, one could see smoke stacks rising from the chimneys and into the mostly clear night sky. On the corner, at the end of the block was a 7-Eleven with a 24-hours sign and gas pumps, seeming to be single-handedly illuminating that side of the street. At least I thought it was a 7-Eleven, until I realized the sign actually read 'Heaven-Eleven.'

  What the…

  I shook my head and made a mental note of the place, for the sake of restocking my supply of smokes. There was also an old school telephone booth in the parking lot.

  Across the street from the 'Heaven Eleven,' was a police cruiser, parked at a Tim Hortons—no…wait…the sigh read 'Grim Morton's.'

  “What,” I said, to no one in particular, “is this town run by a bunch of comedians?”

  That's when I first saw her.

  There, out of the police cruiser, and into the Grim Morton's, stepped a slender, petite, breathtakingly beautiful blonde. Her hair was straight, and tied back into a no-nonsense ponytail.

  I was instantly and indelibly smitten. I realize I said this very same thing about Danny a chapter or two ago, but this time, it's different. Okay, so maybe it's not so different. Maybe my sister's right about me, and I'm game to chase just about any pretty girl I see. But this one thing is true: From now until whenever I move away from this god-forsaken crap-hole of a town, she'll always be the first Bordertown native I ever cast eyes upon. And my god, was she ever easy on the eyes. Even from this distance, I new this girl was a ten. Or at least a nine. Which honestly is still way out of my league, being maybe only a seven myself. Maybe a six. Or
a five. Maybe I'm too hard on myself. Maybe we all are. I don't know…You know what? I called myself ruggedly handsome a chapter or two ago. So fuck it. I'm going to stick with that.

  From the acronym 'B.T.P.D.' written on the back of her police vest, notwithstanding the fact she'd just stepped out of a police cruiser, I gathered she must be one of the law officers in this town. If this was the case, I might have to get myself into a little bit of trouble in the near future…

  Naturally, I wanted to get a closer look. I also wanted more cigarettes, so I figured now was as good a time as any to make my way down to the Heaven-Eleven.

  I took a stroll down the street to the Heaven-Eleven, where a small group of kids—three teenaged boys, who looked to be about fifteen at the oldest—eyed me with contempt and smacked one another in the shoulder or chest and made quiet comments to each other as I strolled up.

  “Think we should fuck with him?” I heard one of them say.

  Just you try it, you little punk-ass bitches, I thought. But for now, I decided to ignore them, and not make eye contact. If these little twerps tried to start something with me, I figured I could take them. Though there was one thing that forced me to do a double take. The three youths seemed to be congregating around a giant mound of cigarette butts—a mound almost waist-high.

  Does no one clean up out here, or did these three kids really just smoke that many cigarettes?

  I stepped into the Heaven-Eleven, hoping they stocked my preferred brand of cigs. They did. Unfortunately, there was no store clerk present. Just a note on the counter instructing me to take what I need, and leave exact change.

  That's oddly trusting, I thought to myself.

  I went behind the counter and grabbed a packet of Marlboro Lights. I did indeed leave money for the cigs, not wanting to make a bad impression on my first day here. Or night, rather.

  While I was back there, I noticed a man wearing a sea-monster mask sleeping on a cot through a doorway behind the register, snoring faintly. Not knowing what to make of him exactly, I decided to leave him be.

  I stepped out and looked across the street into the Grim Morton's, at the pretty blonde inside, buying something at the counter—presumably a coffee and a doughnut. She was smiling. No; she was beaming. She seemed to just radiate bubbly cheerfulness, as she greeted the mousy middle-aged woman working behind the counter. And I don't say 'mousy' to be mean. I mean, from where I stood, if I didn't know any better, I’d swear she was actually a mouse-woman in a red-hair wig, working as a barista. The blonde took her coffee and doughnuts and paid. She laughed at something the mousy barista said. It was one of those laughs which I imagine lights up an entire room. I wanted to meet this girl. I just had to talk to her. I started running pick-up lines through my head, not wanting to sound too obvious. Not to say pathetic.