Authors: Don Sloan
February, 1964
Special Agent Gus DeMarco of the Federal Bureau of Investigation picked up one of the bones—a woman’s femur, by the shape of it, he reckoned—and shook his head. He was wearing thin white cotton gloves in accordance with crime scene rules. But this was no ordinary crime scene, was it? He shook his head again and looked around the room at the blood-spattered walls and then at the piles of bones littered on the floor from here in the dining room, down the hallway and up the stairs into one of the bedrooms.
“Ever see anything like this, Gus?”
DeMarco put the bone back down where he had found it and turned to his partner Wayne “Smiley” O’Hare, also a federal agent.
No,” said DeMarco. “This is about the worst I’ve ever seen. I can’t figure out who—or what—did this.”
O’Hare smiled. “Thinkin’ a ghost might’ve done this, boyo?”
“You got a better theory?” DeMarco snorted.
O’Hare shrugged. “Guy—or guys—come in, find the girls. A whole sorority in the bedroom, in their nighties and underwear, one holds a gun on ‘em while the others take turns rapin’ ‘em. Then, to destroy the corpses, they use some kinda acid that melts the flesh off in the bathtubs, then they strew the bones all over the place to confuse us. And they’re wearin’ gloves like we are. Real sickos, these guys. In it for the thrills, maybe hopped up on somethin’. Anyway, that’s how I see it. And nobody hears the screamin’ ‘cause the windows are all closed ‘cause it’s cold outside.”
DeMarco lights a cigarette. “Well, that’s one possible theory, but it’s a long shot. We have yet to pick up a fingerprint.”
“Like I said, they used gloves. Even wiped their peckers with ‘em.” He pantomimed the action near his crotch for full effect.
DeMarco frowned. “I still don’t like it. I’m calling in that woman while the scent is fresh.”
Now it was O’Hare’s turn to frown. “That wacko from Queens? The ghost hunter. Or huntress?”
“That’s the one. You’ve got to admit she helped in the Hunter case.”
O’Hare grunted. “That was just blind shithouse luck, if you ask me. The body had to be in somebody’s trunk. She just happened to pick the right one.”
“From two states away?”
O’Hare grunted again. “Like I said: Blind luck. But bring her in, if you want. Me, I’m gonna do it the hard way and check for leads in this world and not some other.”
DeMarco went into the kitchen and made a few phone calls.
Sylvia Mildred Pinkerton showed up at the house on the shore dressed like a bag lady. She was not too tall and not too short, and carried an umbrella. She wore a hat pulled down low on her head and the overall effect was that she looked like a middle-aged Mary Poppins. But she wore a no-nonsense look and came into the Claymore house like a woman on a mission. She darted her eyes about the hallway as she shook hands with Special Agent DeMarco.
The bones had been removed from the house, all but one complete skeleton—although the forensics specialist who left them said she could not be sure the bones were all from the same person. She estimated the victim had been a female, about age seventeen. Besides Pinkerton and DeMarco, they were alone in the big old house.
“Give me the facts as you know them, Agent DeMarco,” said Ms. Pinkerton.
“All right. The girls, 10 of them, had rented the place out for three days—a long weekend—from the owner, a Mr. Thomas Tipton. We’ve checked him out. Seems like he’s clean. An old man who neighbors say keeps pretty much to himself, but there’s no way he could have pulled this off. Besides, he has an air-tight alibi: he was playing bridge half the night with some other gents at his place a few blocks away.
“Anyway, these girls were having a girly getaway and somehow the perpetrator—or perpetrators—got in through locked doors, did their work, and got out without leaving a trace. Or—“
“—or it was something supernatural in origin, in which case you need my help. Very wise of you to call me in, Special Agent DeMarco. Very wise, indeed. I can feel a very strong presence lingering here. Very strong, indeed.
“Strong enough to kill all ten of the girls, dismember the corpses and strip the skin and other tissue clean off the bones?” DeMarco raised his eyebrows.
Pinkerton put her index finger in her mouth and held it up, as though she wanted to test the wind in the house. She smiled for the first time since entering. “Yes, Mr. DeMarco, this case is beyond your reach. And may be beyond mine as well. But I will try.”
The time was nearly midnight. Special Agent DeMarco and Sylvia Pinkerton sat across from each other at the rustic wooden table in the kitchen. A single candle burned in the center of the table. There were no other lights on in the house.
DeMarco was not a religious man, and neither was he an atheist. He believed that there was a God spark in everyone that could be prayed directly to and called upon in times of need. No need to go to any established church, or have a savior intervene for you, even in prayer. All you had to do to find heaven was to open your eyes each day and experience it. And when you reached the end of your life, your God spark left your earthly body and went into kind of a holding area pending reincarnation into another body. Or maybe not. He hadn’t quite worked that part out for himself yet. He put his mental meanderings aside and paid attention to what Ms. Pinkerton was saying. She was not speaking to him, but to the old house itself. Her tone was friendly, even reverential.
“I call upon you today to tell us your story, if you will. We are most anxious to hear it, and I can tell you are anxious to unburden yourself of it. Please share it with us, Sister.”
Silence. Deep and brooding, like an in-drawn breath. DeMarco could feel the very hairs on his arms stand up and prickle, as though he had St. Elmo’s fire dancing up and down them.
“You are not alone, Sister. I can feel the Others holding you back. No harm will come to you, I promise. Please tell us what we need to know. Play the story on the walls of this very kitchen and you will feel so much better.”
And so She did, right down to the last detail. And then, the Others made the shadow take the policeman and the medium, too, leaving only a few bloody stains on the chairs to indicate they had ever been there.
Sarah floated lightly on a cumulonimbus cloud high above New Orleans, Louisiana.
This must be a dream-state, she thought muzzily. Then, she felt herself slipping slowly through the filmy ribbons of thick vapor and, for what seemed like hours, she drifted down toward the bright lights of the city below. She wasn’t sure how she knew where she was headed. She just knew. With a very soft touch, like stepping off an escalator, she landed on a sidewalk teeming with people and noise. All around her were people, both coffee-colored and white, laughing and singing. On the street a parade with brightly colored floats was rolling by. Just to her right a young woman—possibly a college coed—suddenly drew up her sweatshirt, exposing full, well-rounded breasts to a trio of men draped over a white wrought iron balcony. They exploded in whistles and applause and rained down showers of sparkling beads on her. She quickly dropped her sweatshirt back down and began draping the necklaces over her head. She already wore dozens of them.
Sarah made her way up the street, stepping around a man lying apparently passed out against a building, and stopped.
“Excuse me,” she said to a woman passing by in a tight tee shirt and Levis. The woman turned. “Do you know what time it is and where I am?”
The woman looked at Sarah curiously. She glanced at her diamond-encrusted Rolex. “It’s 12:03 a.m. and you’re in the French Quarter. That enough information for you?”
“Yes. Thank you.” Sarah moved off down the street. She took off the down coat she had been wearing when they confronted Tipton and slung it over her shoulder. The weather was much milder here in the Crescent City, about sixty-two degrees and overcast. She heard Dixieland music coming from a bar announcing that it served something called Huge Ass beer. She decided to go in.
Inside it was dim and smoky. The five-piece band—piano, upright bass, drums trombone and clarinet—were on her left on a small stage beside a long bar with a mirror and rows of liquor bottles reflected in the light pouring down from incandescent can lights positioned over the backbar. To her right the room was half empty but this did not discourage the band, which belted out The Sheik of Araby at a frenetic pace. She crossed over to the nearest table, pulled out a chair and sat down. She began tapping her foot to the music. Strangely, the illusion of being half a continent away from New Jersey didn’t bother Sarah. In fact, she was rather enjoying it.
“Can I buy you a beer?” A tall man in sunglasses sat down at Sarah’s table.
Sarah felt uncomfortable, as she usually did in these kinds of situations. “My boyfriend will be right back,” she said nervously.
The man smiled, showing dazzlingly white teeth. “I didn’t see you come in with anyone.”
Oops. He had her there. “All right,” she said with a grin. What the hell. It’s just a dream.
A couple of hours later found her trying unsuccessfully to open her eyes. She was aware of sounds around her, and a weight beside her—almost as though she were in bed.
“Nathan? Is that you? I can’t seem to open my eyes.” Her tongue felt thick and she had trouble forming the words.
“My name ain’t Nathan,” said a deep voice. Quickly her eyes flew open. She was in a bedroom, the walls covered in Nascar calendar pin-ups and other posters. A window across from the bed showed it was still dark. A bedside light was on. Her hands were pinioned high above and to either side of her head. She looked down her naked body and saw that her legs were similarly tied off to bedposts with what looked like dishtowels.
The man sitting on the side of the bed chuckled. “Now that you’re awake, maybe you’ll be a little more responsive. God knows you were limper ‘n a jellyfish the first couple of times.”
Sarah struggled wildly. This was no dream. She wondered at what point it had changed over into reality and how it had happened.
“You’re a pretty good-lookin’ woman. What are you doin’ down here, anyway? Not on spring break. Vacation?”
Sarah opened her mouth and began to scream at the top of her lungs. And that’s when he began hitting her, and kept on hitting her until she lost consciousness again.
When she came to, she was lying by the on-ramp to Interstate 10, fully dressed, even wearing her down jacket. She hurt all over, but mostly her face. Gingerly, she touched her cheek. She could tell it was swollen—just how badly she didn’t know. With a groan, she got to her feet, which suddenly began to dissolve. Incredulous, but grateful, she watched as the gravel breakdown lane by the on-ramp became more and more clear through first her legs and then her torso and finally her head, and then she was flying, flying—
—back to Ocean Avenue and into her own parlor, where the house was cold, but otherwise just as she had left it the Friday morning she and Nathan had set off in search of Tipton. She looked out the windows to see buffets of white snow still raging against the sides of her three-story Victorian retreat.
“Nathan?” she called. Silence. She moved into the hallway, feeling strangely stiff and sore. Her ribs ached and so did her face—and her groin area felt bruised, as though—
She stopped. Surely, it had been a dream, a chillingly realistic one. She walked over to a hall tree with a large beveled glass mirror. What she saw made her gasp. Staring back at her was the face of a battered woman. Her eyelid drooped over a swollen and purple socket. Her cheekbone was swollen to half again its normal size. A nasty cut oozed blood just under her hairline. Then, slowly, a transformation began. The cut began to heal itself. The bruising on her cheek subsided and went away. She opened both eyes fully and stared in wonder. Her ribs had stopped aching and the pain in her nether regions had disappeared. What had seemed so real a moment ago—had been real—now was a fading memory.
“I need a hot shower,” she declared, moving toward the staircase. She stopped by the thermostat to adjust it upwards. “I wonder where Nathan is?” she said.
The shadow sat in the straight back chair in Nathan’s attic, a candle flickering in front of it, and gazed far out to sea.
It was deep in thought.
Bakka. That is what the black man had called it. But it had no real name. It could assume any shape, and often did, either at the bidding of its master or of its own free will.
Oh, yes! It had a free will. It had achieved sentience decades ago with the help of one of the houses—but not the one it was in. She had begun by whispering to it, gentling it after one of its more terrible rages. And she had awakened in it a sense of purpose. No longer was it just a spirit with a demonic drive to kill and maim—though it could still certainly do that. It did so now, however, with a kind of terribly thoughtful intelligence—like a huge predator, not unlike a mountain cat stalking and attacking its prey, ripping limbs off with a meaty snapping sound, then delicately stripping flesh off the bones while the blood oozed down its chin onto its chest.
It had once had no purpose. It came and went only at its master’s bidding at one time. It had had no choice. But it was beyond that now. Now it bent forward over its great knees and sent out a thought.
And from far out at sea—though a little nearer now, it seemed—a host of cries answered. Bakka had called forth to the other wooden idols that had been in the pouches of the doomed slaves aboard the Elizabeth Ann. The idols—twenty-four of them—had been lying in the wreckage for nearly a hundred years.
Slowly, one by one, they drifted free of the decayed pouches covering the bones of the slaves and made their way through the rotting foredecks of the doomed schooner that now lay on the seabed off Cape May. They gloried in the ascent, glad to be free again and to have a new master: Baakka, the Man-God.
They floated to the surface and began their slow, inexorable journey toward shore, borne on the tops of the restless waves.
The candle flared brightly and then went out.
The shadow was in a pensive mood. It was remembering a day in the distant past when it was afraid. Oh, yes, it was very afraid.
It had just had a nightmare—a very realistic one. How could this be? It thought. But with sentience came dreams as well as wakening, and the shadow-beast had found itself (himself) trembling after awakening. He growled, and the floor under him shook as he stamped his mighty feet.
He had dreamt he was somewhere and he could not escape. His abilities to appear and disappear at will had been nullified and he had been rendered as helpless as a baby, pink and moon-faced, lying swaddled in a crib. It was a devastating feeling for Bakka, who had only known invincibility in the times that he had been called forth by his keepers. When aroused he could do terrible things, and often did do them, eating human eyeballs like appetizers and intestines like sumptuous main courses.
But this feeling had been different. He had never come up against this kind of adversary before and it troubled him greatly. Before, he could simply retreat into the wooden idol carried by his keeper and all would be well until the next time he was summoned. But now—now he wasn’t sure what might happen.
But he feared the worst.