Nocturnes (2004) Read online

  Charles gave me a 40-watt smile. “Sure, you seem like the guy we’ve been waiting for.”

  He hadn’t even asked for my résumé. I’d typed it up at the local Kinko’s the night before, spending money I couldn’t afford to waste. Now I was feeling a little resentful at having spent my time preparing it. True, it maybe wouldn’t stand up much to close examination, and the people included for reference purposes would be harder to track down than dodos, but I’d made the effort.

  “I brought a résumé,” I said, and I was kind of surprised at how hurt my voice sounded. Hell, you’d think the guy had refused to hire me, the way I was going on.

  Charles’s smile brightened maybe two watts.

  “Hey, that’s great,” he said.

  I handed it over. He didn’t even glance at it, just put it on top of a trayload of papers that looked as if they hadn’t been touched since the last locomotive left the building. In fact, it was hard to see precisely what Mr. Rone’s company actually did. From what I could tell, we were the only people in the entire building.

  Still, that was it. I had the job.

  They gave me a brown uniform, a flashlight, and a gun. I was told the paperwork for the gun would be sorted out later, and I didn’t question them. I didn’t imagine that I’d ever have to use it, anyway. The worst that could happen, I thought, was that some kids might try to break in and I’d have to run them off. I figured that I could handle myself against kids. Just in case, I brought my own telescopic baton and a can of Mace.

  Each night before I went to work, I filled a small flask with Wild Turkey, just to keep out the cold. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not a big drinker, and never was, but a northeastern waterfront gets pretty cold in the winter. When you’re wandering around the yards, or checking out those unheated buildings, then there are times when you’re pretty glad of something to warm the heart.

  I never minded working alone. I’d read some—mystery stories, mainly—or do word puzzles, or watch late-night TV. I didn’t have a wife to worry about. I used to have a wife, but she’s gone now. People think she left me, went to live in Oregon, but I know different.

  It was the start of my second week when the noises began. There were two vacant buildings on the site, close by the main road. The larger one was three stories tall, and kind of run-down. The windows were covered with wire screens, so mostly I just checked the locks on the doors to make sure that they hadn’t been tampered with, but I’d never gone inside. I’d never had any call to, until then.

  I was doing my usual 2 A.M. round when I heard the sound of doors opening and closing inside the empty building, and thought I saw the flicker of flames. When I checked the doors and windows, they all seemed to be secure and I could hear no voices from within. I shone my flashlight onto the roof, but, as far as I could see, it looked okay. There were no holes, no busted slates through which someone could have squeezed. But those flames were a worry: if some hobo had found a way in, then lit a fire and fallen asleep, the whole place might go up.

  I took my keys from my belt and found the one that fitted the main door lock. I’d color-coded them all with Scotch tape, then learned the colors so I’d know them immediately. The door opened easily and I stepped inside, finding myself in a low-ceilinged room that extended the entire length of the ground floor.

  At the end of the room was an open doorway from which one flight of stairs ascended to the upper levels, while another flight led down to the furnace room. The light was coming from there. I slipped the Taurus from its holster, and gun in my right hand, flashlight crossed under it, I headed for the door. I was maybe halfway there when footsteps sounded. A little warning noise was triggered in my head, and I twisted the Mag-lite to kill the beam while I waited, quietly, in the shadows.

  Two people appeared in the doorway. They wore long black coats over black trousers and heavy-soled black boots. Their faces were hidden in shadow until they stepped into the warehouse itself. A single dusty bulb burned over the doorway, and its faint light briefly illuminated their forms. They were a man and a woman, but they were all wrong. Both were bald, with pale, almost gray skulls, crisscrossed with thick veins that bulged against their skin. The man was bigger, with red eyes set into his hairless face, but he had no other features. There was no nose, no mouth, just a flat expanse of skin below those eyes. The woman stood beside him, the shape of her breasts visible beneath her coat. She had a mouth, and a small button nose, but no eyes, just smooth skin from her hairline to her nose.

  From my left came a sound, and two more figures came forward. The first was another tall man, dressed in black like the others. I couldn’t see his face, but the back of his skull was perfectly round and pale. There were no ears to be seen. One hand hung by his side, but the other hand rested on the shoulder of a small, thin man wearing a brown shirt and pants. His back was to me, so I couldn’t see his face, but there was a wound to his right temple and blood on the left side of his head and on the left shoulder of his shirt, as if a bullet had exited from his left temple.

  I should have intervened, but I couldn’t move. I was so scared that I forgot to breathe, and when I realized that I was holding my breath I gasped so loudly that I thought they would hear me and come for me too. For an instant, it seemed that the woman’s eyeless gaze searched the shadows, resting momentarily where I crouched before moving on. Then her fingers probed at the darkness, reaching for the bloodied man. Her mouthless companion did the same and, when all three of the figures were touching him, they guided him gently toward the stairs and pulled the door closed behind them. After a moment’s pause, I followed them.

  The door was unlocked. Behind it were stairs, one flight leading to the upper levels of the warehouse, the other leading down. The furnace in the building shouldn’t have been lit, but it was burning now. I could smell it. I could feel it.

  And so I descended until I came to an iron doorway, almost rusted away on its hinges. It stood open, and I could see the light of flames flickering within, casting an orange glow on the walls and floor. I could hear the roar of the fire within. I moved toward it. There was sweat running down my back, and my palms were slick against the gun and the flashlight. I was almost at the doorway when the fire died, and now there was only the flashlight in my hand to guide me. I breathed deep, then slipped quickly into the doorway.

  “Who’s…?”

  I stopped. The room was empty. Inside, I could see the great furnace, but it was unlit. I walked over to the system and, very gently, reached for it with my hand. I paused before touching it, conscious that if I was mistaken my hand would never be right again.

  The furnace was cold to the touch.

  I made a quick check of the room, but there was nothing else to be seen. It was uncluttered, with but one way in and out. I kept my back to the wall of the stairs, and my gun pointing toward the furnace room, until I reached the main warehouse, then left so quickly that I raised dust from the floor. I spent the rest of the night in my office, with my gun on the desk before me, my senses so heightened that my ears rang.

  I didn’t say anything to anybody about what I thought I had seen. In fact, when I woke up that afternoon and prepared for another night’s work I thought that I might just have imagined it all. Maybe I fell asleep in my chair with one too many nips from the flask under my belt and then just dreamed my way into the warehouse and back to my desk, where I woke up with a memory of mutilated figures taking a small man with a hole in his head down to a furnace room that created heat without burning.

  I mean, what other explanation could there be?

  Nothing else happened for the rest of that week. I heard no more sounds from the warehouse. I even took the trouble of putting a lock and chain on the door, and checked it twice each night, but it never moved. Still, that smell, the odor of burnt powder, lingered. I could detect it on my uniform and in my hair, and no amount of washing seemed to be able to shake it from me.

  Then, one Sunday night, when I was making my usual rounds, I en
tered the warehouse and found the stairwell doorway gaping. The main door to the building had been closed and locked when I arrived. Nobody had been in or out of there in the past week except me. But now the door was open and, once again, I could see the light of flames dancing on the walls. I drew my gun and called out:

  “Hello, anybody there?”

  There was no answer.

  “Come out now,” I shouted, sounding braver than I felt. “You come out now, or I swear I’ll lock you in here and call the cops.”

  There was still no reply, but, in the shadows to my right, a figure moved behind some old crates to the right of the door. I shone the flashlight and caught the edge of something blue as it slipped back into the darkness.

  “Dammit, I see you. You come out now, y’hear?”

  I swallowed once and the noise of it seemed to echo in my head. Although it was a cold night, there was sweat on my forehead and my upper lip. My shirt was soaked in it. Heat was coming from somewhere; intense, searing heat, as if the whole warehouse were ablaze with some hidden fire.

  And I heard the furnace roar.

  I kept the gun level with the flashlight as I stepped softly toward the crates. As I drew closer, the light revealed a bare foot, with filthy, twisted toenails and thick, swollen ankles marbled with blue veins. The hem of a dirty blue dress was visible just below the knee. It was a woman, a down-and-out taking shelter in the warehouse. Maybe she had been there all along and I had just never seen her. There must have been another way in and out for her: a busted window or a concealed door. I’d find it, after I rousted her ass.

  “Okay, lady,” I said, as I drew almost level with her, “out you—”

  But it wasn’t a hobo. Like the old joke goes, it wasn’t even a lady.

  It was my wife.

  Except I wasn’t laughing.

  Her dark hair had grown, obscuring most of her face, and the mottled skin seemed to have tightened on her bones, drawing back her lips and exposing long yellow teeth. Her head was down, her chin almost resting on her chest, and she was looking at the wound in her stomach where the knife had entered, the wound I had made on the night I killed her. Then she raised her head and her eyes were revealed: the blue had faded from them, and they were now almost entirely white. The rictus that was her mouth stretched further, and I knew that she was smiling.

  “Hi, honey,” she said. I could hear the dirt moving in her throat. There was more beneath her broken fingernails, left there as she dug herself out of the shallow grave I had made for her far to the south, where dead leaves would cover her resting place and wild animals would scatter her bones. She moved forward in an awkward shuffle and I backed away from her: one step, then two, until my progress was halted by an obstacle behind me.

  I turned my back on her and found myself staring into the pale face of the earless man in the black coat.

  “You have to go with him,” said my wife, as the man in the black coat laid his hand upon me. I looked up into his face, for he was taller than me by a foot or more. In fact, he might just have been the tallest man I’d ever met.

  “Where am I going?” I asked him, before I realized that he couldn’t hear me. I wanted to run, but the pressure of his hand kept me rooted to the spot.

  I looked over my shoulder to where my dead wife stood. This had to be a dream, I thought, a bad dream, the all-time worst nightmare I could ever fear to have. But instead of struggling, or crying out, or pinching myself awake, I heard the sound of my own voice speaking calmly.

  “Tell me,” I said. “Tell me where I’m going.”

  The dirt in her throat shifted again. “You’re going underground,” she said.

  I tried to move then, but all the strength seemed to have left my body. I couldn’t even raise my gun. In the doorway beyond, two figures now stood: the woman without eyes and the man without a mouth. The mouthless figure nodded to the man now holding me, and he began to guide me firmly toward the stairwell, oblivious to my words.

  “No,” I said. “This isn’t right.”

  But, of course, there was no sound from him, and at last I understood.

  Earless, so that he could not hear the pleas of those for whom he came.

  Eyeless, so that she could not see those she fed to the flames.

  And the mute judge, the repository of sins, unable to speak of what he had seen or heard, merely required to nod his assent to the passing of the sentence.

  Three daemons, each perfect in its mutilation.

  My feet were sliding on the dusty floor as I was dragged by the collar toward the waiting flames. I looked to the doorway of the warehouse and saw a man in a gray suit watching me. It was Mr. Rone. I cried out to him, but he merely smiled his dim smile and closed the door. I could hear the sound of his key turning in the lock. I remembered the papers on his desk, old and dusty. I recalled the absence of a secretary, and a man sweeping the floors whose voice, now that I thought of it, might have sounded something like that of Charles Rone himself.

  I was nearly at the doorway when I spoke for the last time.

  I looked up at the daemons standing before me and said simply: “But I’m not dead.”

  And at that moment, I felt my right hand start to raise my gun to my temple and saw, in my head, a small, thin man with blood on his shoulder walking to the stairs. Beside me, I heard my dead wife’s voice beside my ear. There was no breath, only sound.

  “Let me help you with that,” she whispered. Her hand closed upon mine, pressing my finger against the trigger as she lifted the gun to my skull.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  The sound of the furnace filled my head. Its heat rose through the floor and melted the soles of my shoes. Already, I could smell my hair burning.

  “Too late,” she replied.

  The gun exploded and the world was shrouded in crimson as I prepared to descend.

  The Underbury Witches

  Steam and fog swirled together upon the station platform, turning men and women to gray phantoms and creating traps for the unwary out of carelessly positioned cases and chests. The night was growing colder, and a faint sheen of frost could already be detected upon the roof of the ticket office. Through the steamed-up glass of the waiting room figures could faintly be discerned, huddling close to the noisy radiators that reeked of oil and smoldering dust. Some drank tea from cheap cups lined with spidery cracks, sipping urgently as though apprehensive that the crockery might yet disintegrate in their hands and shower them with tepid liquid. Tired children cried in the arms of weary parents. A retired major tried to engage two soldiers in conversation, but the men, new conscripts already fearful of the trenches, were in no mood to talk.

  The station master’s whistle sounded defiantly in the gloom, his lamp swinging gently high above his head, and the train slowly began to move away, leaving only two other men standing upon the suddenly deserted platform. Had there been anyone to see or to care, it would have become quickly apparent that the new arrivals did not belong in Underbury. They carried heavy bags and were dressed in city clothes. One, the larger and elder of the two, wore a bowler hat, and a muffler around his mouth and chin. His brown coat was slightly frayed at the sleeves, and his shoes were built for comfort and long life, with few nods to fashion or aesthetics.

  His companion was almost as tall as he, but slighter and better dressed. His coat was short and black, and he wore no hat, exposing a mass of dark hair that was a good deal longer than would ordinarily have been considered acceptable in his chosen profession. His eyes were very blue, and he might almost have been called handsome were it not for a curious aspect to his mouth, which curled down slightly at the edges and gave him an air of perpetual disapproval.

  “No welcoming committee, then, sir,” said the older man. His name was Arthur Stokes, and he was proud to call himself a sergeant of detectives in what he did not doubt was the greatest police force in the world.

  “The locals never like it when they’re forced to accept help from London,” sa
id the other policeman. His name was Burke, and he enjoyed the rank of inspector in Scotland Yard, if enjoyed was indeed the right word. Judging by his expression at the moment in question, endured might have been a more appropriate term. “The arrival of two of us is unlikely to make them doubly grateful.”

  They made their way through the station and onto the road beyond, where a man stood waiting beside a battered black car.

  “You’ll be the gentlemen from London,” he said.

  “We are,” said Burke. “And you would be?”

  “My name’s Croft. The constable sent me to collect you. He’s busy at the moment. Local newspapermen. We’ve had some of the London boys calling on us as well.”

  Burke looked puzzled. “He was told not to make any comment until we arrived,” he said.

  Croft reached out to take their bags.

  “And how’s he supposed to do that, then, if he can’t talk to them first to tell them that he can’t make no comment?” he asked.

  He winked at Burke. Sergeant Stokes had never seen anyone wink at the inspector before, and he wasn’t convinced that Croft was the ideal candidate to be the first.

  “Fair point, I suppose, sir,” said Sergeant Stokes hurriedly, then added, for form’s sake: “Don’t you think?”

  Burke gave his sergeant a look that suggested he thought a great many things, of which few were complimentary toward the present company.

  “Whose side are you on, Sergeant?”

  “The side of law and order, sir,” Burke replied happily. “The side of law and order.”

  The witch panic that gripped Europe for over three hundred years, beginning in the mid-1400s and ending with the death in Switzerland in 1782 of Anna Goldi, the last woman in Western Europe to be executed for witchcraft, claimed the lives of between fifty and one hundred thousand people, of whom eighty percent were women, most of them old and most of them poor. Such panics were most prevalent in the German lands, which accounted for roughly half of all those killed. Fewer than five hundred died in England, but twice that amount were executed in Scotland, due in no small part to the Scottish courts’ greater tolerance for torture as a means of securing confessions, and the paranoia of its young monarch, James VI.