Ghost Mortem (Bordertown Chronicle Book 1) Read online

  Hey, wait a minute!

  “You!” I practically shouted.

  I moved quickly towards the scrotesque abomination.

  He continued to stare back at me, not taking his gaze away from mine while continuing to devour his raw ear of corn. He seemed to eat faster and faster the closer I got, like some kind of corn-eating blender.

  As I closed in, he lobbed the cob at me, causing me to momentarily shield my eyes, only to be struck instead in my ever-loving groin.

  “Augh,” I gasped.

  Predictably, I cupped my hands over my aching balls and collapsed to the ground.

  I looked back up to see parts of the cornfield being disturbed as my assailant scuttled away. He took flight, swooping up and down into the night sky like some kind of depraved bat out of hell.

  “Are you okay?” Vikki asked.

  “Sure,” I groaned. “I always lie on the ground clutching my groin like this.”

  Vikki snorted a sympathetic laugh.

  We both stared at the creature a moment as it flew over the moonlit horizon like a wailing, maniacal banshee.

  I took a breath and stood back up.

  “What the hell was that thing?” I said.

  “It's a tanuki,” she said, as if that were somehow self-explanatory.

  “What in the seven hells is a tanuki?”

  “Don't worry, they're harmless.”

  “Harmless, huh?” I said, still clutching my aching, and possibly slightly-bruised balls.

  Tell that to my god-damned nuts, lady!

  “Well…mostly harmless,” she added.

  She seemed to be staring down the road, waiting for whoever was driving towards us.

  When the vehicle got close enough, and I could see more than just its headlights, I realized it was too high off the ground to be a car. It hovered perhaps ten feet above the road. It had a glass dome roof and looked like something George Jetson might have driven. In other words, it was basically a steam punk flying saucer.

  “Here comes the Doc,” said Vikki.

  “The Doc's an alien?”

  Vikki turned to me and narrowed her eyes for a moment. Then she nodded, as though she understood my confusion.

  “No, he's not an alien. That's just how he gets around town.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Wait, is that legal? Like, it isn't an air traffic control violation of something?”

  Vikki smiled at me and shrugged. “We don't really have a protocol for that. Besides. Doc's the guy that makes all of our equipment.”

  The vehicle didn’t seem to slow as it approached, and I was beginning to wonder if it was going to plow right into us. I got ready to pull the pretty deputy out of the way, though why she wasn’t bracing herself already, I couldn't say.

  The vehicle suddenly stopped and skidded sideways to a halt, the way a hockey player might skid to a stop in a rink. A blast of steam jetted out in all directions from the scientific wonder before us. The top of the vehicle lifted.

  Out of the flying saucer, popped a man I think could be most concisely described as steam punk Dr. Wily. He wore a white lab coat, which billowed in the wind, as did the thick tufts of white hair on either side of his otherwise bald head. He lifted the fogged-up goggles from his eyes and placed them on his bald, sweaty pate.

  “Evening, Vikki,” he said.

  “Evening, Doc,” she replied.

  'Doc' clumsily stepped out of his vehicle. We heard the clinking of bottles on the floor of the vehicle, then some incomprehensible muttering.

  “Oy gavalt, meshuganah schlimazel…”

  What is that, Yiddish?

  The old Yid staggered a bit as he got out of the vehicle. He ambled toward us, and then we were greeted with a slight hint of booze-breath.

  “Doc, you haven’t been drinking and driving tonight, have you?”

  “What are you, the sobriety police?”

  “No, Doc,” Vikki said wearily, though not unkindly, and with another conspiratorial smile my way, “just the regular police.”

  “Well are you ready to do this or what? I didn’t just schlep all this way for an after school special.”

  “All right, Doc. Calm down. Are you ready to work?”

  “Am I ready? Are my wife's matzo-balls big enough to choke a behemoth?” he replied.

  “I don't know, Doc. I can't say I've had the pleasure of trying Rachel's matzo-balls. Are they?”

  “They're groys. Like a coconut,” he said.

  “I bet they're not bigger than tanuki balls,” I said.

  Years from now, I would remember this as the first thing I ever said to Doc Bronstein.

  Oy vey.

  Doc took a moment to stare at me like I was a mirage he couldn't quite make out.

  “O…kay…” Vikki began, and then turned back to the Doc. “I'll just take that as a yes, then. Shall we?”

  Doc nodded. “Let's just get this meshuganah madness over with.”

  Doc produced a small object I can only describe as a beacon of some kind. He pressed a button, and for a moment, a light seemed to scan and pass over the whole field. Then, as if by magic, I could see outlines of everything. They weren’t bright. They were faint, either. They were oddly distinct, like he'd just turned the whole cornfield into a ray-traced video game landscape.

  “Over there,” Vikki said.

  We three proceeded into the cornfield.

  “Who’s the boychik?” Doc asked.

  “That’s our new deputy,” she replied, nodding to me with a subtle smile.

  Wait, what?

  I thought for a moment. She must have thought I was my father. That's how she seemed to know my surname. I opened my mouth to speak, but the old Yid spoke first.

  “You look ferdrayt.”

  “I look what?”

  “Fertummelt,” he said, as if that somehow cleared it all up.

  “I’m sorry. My Yiddish must be rusty” I asked.

  “Ay-ay-ay! Yiddish must be rusty, he says. Boychik, is that a Star of David I see around your neck, or are you just one of those meshuganah schmendriks who saw it in a store and thought it would make you look like a macher?”

  “It was my mother’s,” I said.

  “Didn’t your mother ever teach you proper Yiddish?”

  “God knows she tried. Let's see…I remember schlepping… schlemiel… schlimazel… mainly a bunch of words that begin with schluh.”

  “So she’s not a completely hopeless case,” he said.

  I couldn’t tell if he was trying to be funny, or if he was just a huge jack-ass.

  “Could we not talk about my mother right now?” I said.

  He put his hands up in the air dismissively and moved on.

  Chapter 7

  Ten seconds later, Doc Braunstein, Vikki and I were standing around the macabre crime scene. The half-naked corpse of a young woman was strung up on a large, wooden cross. She looked like she might have been native, or maybe white with tan skin and dark hair. Maybe some kind of ethnic mix of the two. She couldn’t have been older than about twenty. Those details are vague to me, because just about all of them were dwarfed by what had been done to the poor girl’s corpse. She had countless gashes cut into her body, most of which had healed over somewhat with scar tissue. The wounds looked almost as though they’d all been made to look like open eyes, staring out in every direction into the darkness. But the most disturbing fact of all was…that the poor girl's actual eyes were gone. Instead they looked like two gaping mouths, screaming silently, into the night.

  “What…the…fff…” was all I could get out.

  “Oh my god,” said Vikki.

  “You recognize her?” the Doc asked.

  “No. I don't think she's local,” said Vikki, looking over the body more closely with a flashlight. “But it's hard to tell. She's been so…my god…”

  Vikki moved her flashlight further down the body, looking over the eye-like wounds, passing over her soiled bra and panties.

  “No I.D. on the bod
y,” she said.

  She passed over the body with her flashlight, stopping on her stomach which had the word “RACHE” carved into her flesh in crazy-looking block letters.

  “Looks like the killer left us a message,” said Vikki.

  “What…the…actual…fuck…” I said.

  “Rache?” said the Doc.

  “That mean something to you?” asked Vikki. “Could that be like 'Rachel' like your wife?”

  “I don't know,” said the Doc. “It looks like our killer wasn't in any hurry to finish…whatever meshuganah message he's trying to leave us. Rache can also mean—”

  “Revenge,” I said.

  Doc looked impressed. “Your German is better than your Yiddish.”

  “No, it's…it's like something from a Sherlock Holmes book.”

  Doc nodded.

  I took another look up and down the mutilated corpse. Aside from the bra and panties clinging to her body, now caked with dried blood, the girl had nothing else on her. Her countless open wounds seemed not so much to have bled out, as to have dribbled upwards. How that was even possible, I didn’t know. I was a little out of my depth.

  “Many of these wounds are old,” said the Doc.

  “The ligature marks on her wrists and ankles look old,” said Vikki. “She was probably restrained for weeks before she died. How long has she been out here, Doc?”

  “Can’t have been longer than a day. I’d say about twelve hours or so. And judging by the lividity, I’d say she was hanging upside down for sometime after she died. Look, boychik, maybe you’ll learn something,” he said to me now. “See how the blood looks like it all pooled in the top half of her body. And there, see the way the wounds seem to have bled upwards?”

  I didn’t want to look. I wanted to be sick.

  “Who the hell could do this to another human being?” I asked.

  “Who indeed, boychik. Who indeed,” he replied, puckering his lips, looking pensive.

  Vikki turned to me.

  “What’s the most troubling thing about this scene? What do you think?”

  Vikki’s question seemed to be directed at me more than the Doc.

  I looked to the Doc, who just looked back to me expectantly.

  “Don’t look at me, boychik.”

  I looked back at the body. There was something disturbing about it all right. Many things, to be sure. So much so that I didn't know where to begin. The eye-carvings, the missing eyes. But one thing was irking me: I was creeped out by this uncanny sense I'd seen it all before.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “All of it. It’s all pretty fucking disturbing if you ask me. Eyes where there shouldn't be eyes. No eyes where her eyes should be. And the message carved into her for a start.”

  And then there was the fact that the modus operandi here is virtually identical to Darius Danko's—something I wasn't technically supposed to know. Something I had learned by going through my father's police files one night when I was home alone and bored. Files he was technically not supposed to bring home either, but the Darius Danko case had somehow consumed him back then. I was only thirteen at the time. I had nightmares for weeks after that. Remember I said I used to awaken from nightmares as a kid? Well this—what I was staring at right now—the work my father took home with him back then. This is the stuff that fueled my nightmares. Except now I had no mother's shoulder to cry on.

  “But what’s missing?” Vikki asked.

  “You mean, aside from her eyes…?” I essayed sheepishly.

  “Yes…” said the Doc. “Aside from that. But yes, at least we know we're dealing with an enucleator.”

  “A what-now?” I said. “Wait, don't tell me he cut off her…her you-know-what too!”

  I looked back at the corpse in horror. Not that I was keen on seeing what Rache the Ripper had done to this poor girl's—

  “An enucleator,” said the Doc, clearing his voice. “Is a serial killer who removes his victims' eyes. Though to what end, we've yet to determine.”

  “Oh,” I said, only ever-so-slightly relieved. Because it really didn't make this poor woman any less dead, or the scene any less gruesome. “Right…I knew that.”

  “Is this nudnik for real?” I heard the Doc say to Vikki. “I thought he was supposed to be the best.”

  Vikki screwed up her face and looked at me. Then she shook her head as if shaking away a thing she didn't want to say.

  “Doc, are you getting any psycho-kinetic energy readings?” she asked.

  “Zilch,” he said. “I’m getting bupkis. No P.K.E. spikes, no ectoplasmic emanations. Nothing.”

  “Me neither,” she said.

  Vikki looked at me again, and noted that I evidently still wasn’t getting it.

  “There’s no ghost,” she added.

  “Oh,” I said. “And…that’s weird…is it?”

  “Ay-ay-ay,” said the Doc. “Yes, boychik, that's weird.”

  “This woman’s clearly been murdered,” said Vikki. “Or at the very least, abducted and tortured, and then expired. Perhaps unintentionally. But then she was staged here, like this, quite deliberately, in the middle of a corn field like some kind of human scarecrow. And yet there’s no ghost here, haunting the body.”

  “Maybe she just um…” I started. “I’m sorry. I’ve just never actually talked about ghosts with, like, you know, other non-ghosts before. What’s supposed to happen exactly?”

  “Well,” answered Vikki, “normally, when people die, they get a corridor of light shooting down from the heavens to carry them into the afterlife. You’ve probably seen them, right? Wait… How long have you been seeing them? Five years, right?”

  “Right. I… Wait. How did you know that? No one knows that.”

  “I’ve read your file, silly. Haven’t you read mine?”

  “What? No. What file? And why would I read it?”

  “We’re supposed to be partners, Jack. Wait a second. You are the new deputy, right? Deputy Jack Masters?”

  I laughed. Finally things were starting to make a little sense.

  “No. Jack Masters is my father. I’m his son, Gavin.”

  “Oh…” she started, and then smiled, “I thought you looked younger than you were supposed to be! And with a lot more hair. God, you sure look like his picture though.” She laughed. “I’m sorry. Oh…god. Oh. Oh, this is so embarrassing.”

  “It’s all right,” I said. “I’m just glad I’m finally figuring out what’s going on.”

  Then it hit me.

  “Wait a second. Vikki, are you telling me that my father’s been able to ghosts for five years, and that pompous wise-ass never told me?”

  She shrugged sheepishly. “I guess not?”

  “God damn it! That’s so like him! Just keeps everything to himself. I’ve spent the last five years wondering if I was some kind of X-factor, or if I was just fucking crazy.”

  “I don’t suppose you took it upon yourself to tell him either,” she needled, a smirk on her face.

  “Well…no. Of course not. He would have thought I was craz—oh… Yeah. Okay. I see your point.”

  Her grin broadened. It seemed like a sympathetic grin. I couldn't help but smile back. God, this girl was like a ray of sunshine in the dead of night. Even here, with a carved-up body, which kind of horrified me. Being near Vikki made me feel…I don't know…safer somehow.

  “We probably shouldn’t be sharing details of a sensitive case with a civilian like this,” she said, sounding regretful.

  “Bah, he’s here now,” said the Doc. “Might as well make use of him. Besides, he can see ghosts too. That’s pretty rare. Especially for one so young as you, boychik.”

  “Why is it rare?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Who's John Galt?”

  “What?”

  Doc sighed. “It just is, boychik.”

  “So wait… What is supposed to happen then?”

  “Well,” said Vikki, “we should probably drive you back to the courthouse and—”


  “No,” I said. “The hell with that. You asked me if I’ve seen the corridors of light. The ones that shoot right up into the sky from the ground, right? Yeah, I’ve seen them. I used to see one every now and again, usually coming from the hospital by my school back in Regina, and occasionally from an ambulance. Or sometimes by the side of the road, like in a car wreck. And bathrooms for some strange reason. Yeah, I’ve seen them, and I used to follow them. They’re like rainbows that lead to pots of gold. Except replace the pot of gold with a dead body. That's something a kid can't unsee. So yeah. I know them. What about them? What’s different this time? I want to know.”

  Vikki and the Doc exchanged an awkward look.

  “Why?” she said.

  I looked at the young lifeless woman hanging there in the field. I tried to imagine her family. The mother that missed her. The father who'd vow revenge. Maybe she had a brother who…I don’t know. She looked to be about my sister’s age. Or like…that other girl I met earlier tonight. Danny. She could be the spitting image of Danny! I guess there was some kind of fraternal, over-protective reflex kicking in.

  “Because I have to do something. Because this isn’t…” I said, trailing off, trying not to let my emotions get the best of me. “I have a sister this age. And this…this isn’t right.”

  “It isn’t, is it?” said Vikki. “Okay. Look, normally, when people die, and their spirit emerges, they get a corridor of light. You've seen them. That's what we call those beams that shoot down from the sky. Some people call it a corridor of light. Others call it the light of the netherworld. It opens for people when they die, to carry them to…whatever awaits us on the other side. Most of the time it's almost immediate.”

  “Okay. So maybe this woman took hers.”

  Vikki shook her head. “When people die like this, they almost never take their corridors into the sky. It generally won’t even appear until a person has made peace with their death. Like…”