Four Ghosts Read online

  COVER ART BY WILLIAM COOK

  Copyright 2013 James Ward Kirk Publishing

  Copyright James Ward Kirk Publishing 2013

  Internet: jwkfiction.com

  Twitter: @jameswardkirk

  Facebook: James-Ward-Kirk-Fiction

  Cover art and design copyright William Cook 2013

  ISBN-13: 978-0615893624 (James Ward Kirk Publishing)

  ISBN-10: 0615893627

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher or author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review.

  Contents

  IntroductionMurphy Edwards 5

  Paula D. Ashe:Mater Nihil

  William Cook: Dead and Buried

  Murphy Edwards:Stone Cold

  Christine Sutton:The Outcome

  Introduction

  Murphy Edwards

  When James Ward Kirk first approached me with the premise of “Four Ghosts” and invited me to contribute a novella I told him I would have to think long and hard about it. Three or four minutes later I called him back with an enthusiastic YES. I mean, who wouldn’t want to be in a collection of ghostly novellas with the likes of fellow authors Paula D. Ashe, William Cook and Christine Sutton and an editor like James Ward Kirk at the helm? Thus, the premise was set, the guidelines established and the wheels began to turn. A few weeks later, reality began to set in and I found myself asking: “What in the Hell have you gotten yourself into this time?” Needless to say, those wheels were turning very slowly.

  As with most authors, I found myself fighting a bit of writer’s anxiety. Actually, I was battling a humongous dose of writer’s anxiety. As I steadily flailed away with my ‘take’ on the redemption-by-ghost theme a tiny little voice kept roaring in my ear: “Murphy, what’s with you? You write crime and noir and horror and suspense. You don’t DO ghosts.” That little voice haunted me (no pun intended). It was everywhere— at my desk, in my car, in my sleep, in my nightmares—and I got little rest. Still, I kept at it, writing and rewriting—sentences, paragraphs, characters, even whole chapters. And that snotty little voice kept growling in my ear, giving me no quarter. And then, a wonderful thing happened. All those endless words, pages and scenes began to gel and make some sense.

  The end result is my take on James Wards Kirk’s original idea of a ghostly redemption. It’s a little ditty I like to call “Stone Cold” and I’m not sure it would ever have been written, had James not honored me with the invitation, enticed me with his brainchild and motivated me with his ever-present editor’s whip and chair! And that little voice? Well, I finally managed to muzzle the cocky little bastard.

  May “Four Ghosts” keep you up till dawn and thirsting for more.

  Murphy Edwards

  Warrior

  Donated by Mike Jansen, from the original

  Portuguese painting,

  Unknown Artist

  Paula D. Ashe

  Mater Nihil

  Prologue

  Mary and Dave Christos jolt from sleep at the exact same moment.

  “What was that?

  “Did you hear?”

  Sleepiness enshrouds them, clings to their minds like webbing. Mary scoots herself up, leans over to her nightstand and finds her eyeglasses beside the tumbler of water she always takes with her to bed.

  Dave flips the comforter and sheets away, stands up in the dark. Forty-seven years old, his hips pop whenever he stands and for the last two months a little bright wire of pain sizzles down the center of his left leg. He hasn’t told Mary. She’ll tell him to go see Dr. Ramachandran, and all he’ll do is tell him to go to physical therapy. He did physical therapy for three months after the car accident and it didn’t help then. He can’t imagine that ten years later it’s going to work now. He holds his hands out in front of him, stares at his palms.

  “What’s wrong, honey?”

  He inhales slowly, wills his clammy fingers to still.

  “Nothing. Just . . . my hands are shaking. And damp.”

  Mary slips on her glasses, flips back the covers, and slides her feet into her house slippers that wait obediently for her through the night until the next morning. The bed groans as she stands. Eight years ago, she woke up one morning with sixty extra pounds on her once small frame. She knows it didn’t really happen overnight, but it felt like it’d happened overnight. She is round and soft at her middle, sagging in all the places she shouldn’t. Dave hasn’t complained. But then again, Dave would have to be interested in her to complain.

  “That’s strange. Did you—”

  A scream slices through their home. Mary jumps, Dave feels his terrified senses expand in the dark. His ears strain to pick up any errant sound, his eyes gape into the gloom. Their bedroom is a jumble of pragmatism and loss. Furniture for keeping things, furniture littered with framed photographs of their daughter, ten years gone.

  “Is that coming from—?”

  “—next door?”

  In unison, they leave their bedroom and hurry downstairs. At the foyer closet, Dave has one arm into his jacket before realizing his teeth are chattering. Clenching his jaws he watches as Mary zips herself into a once oversized fleece pullover. Now she sort of looks like a sow in a BU hoodie. A pang of guilt flares in his gut.

  “Mary?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Are you crying?”

  “No,” she says and starts to rub her fingertips beneath her eyes. “What would I be cry--”

  Tears glisten in her hands, reflect the stark October moonlight streaming through the windows. “Well,” she wipes away the evidence and blinks rapidly. “I don’t know what that’s about.”

  Silently, they tramp outside, ignoring the icy air nipping at their reddening skin. At the stoop they hear the scream again. It’s definitely coming from inside Jayson and Mallory Kirkmans home.

  “Should we call the police?” Dave turns to his wife before turning the key in the lock, the key the Kirkmans gave them when learning of Mallory’s pregnancy, considering it necessary as Jayson frequently travels for business.

  “We can once we get inside, what if she’s hurt?”

  Dave never even thought about the gender of the scream. He didn’t even connect it consciously to those people he knew until just now. As he twists the key in the lock, he realizes how little feeling he has for his wife, the Kirkmans, anyone really. Not since the day he woke up in the hospital with seven metal screws bolted through the bones of his pulverized left leg, his left arm in a cast, and the news that the impact of the collision (between his Volvo and a Freightliner semi) had instantaneously killed the truck driver and David and Mary’s seventeen year old daughter, Nicole.

  They step into the dark home. Mary sniffs loudly.

  “Do you smell that?” she asks from behind him.

  Dave slowly inhales, wrinkles his nose. “Yeah. Smells like . . . like spoiled meat.”

  Clocks tick in the distance. Neither of them wants to speak.

  “Dog’s not barking,” Dave whispers.

  The absence of the dog and the stillness fills Mary’s torso with dread. She follows her husband through the connecting rooms of the first floor. The layout of the Kirkman’s home is identical to theirs. The Kirkman’s favored more trendy furnishings, couches without arms and tables without legs. They find nothing. Dave leads them upstairs.

  At the top, Dave retches and buries his nose and mouth into the crook of his elbow.

  “Fuck, Jesus! What is that?”

&nbs
p; Mary covers her mouth and nose with her hands. The air is thick with the smell of voided bowels. Through the hall, the only door closed is the master bedroom. Mary wanders away from the bedroom and peeks inside the bathroom, Jayson’s office, the guest bedroom, and a future playroom for the baby.

  Dave finds Mallory Kirkland on her bedroom floor with her eyes gouged out and a pair of scissors jutting from her throat. In the crib, Jaxson Kirkland is barely visible. He is little more than a sopping mound of reddened sludge. Dave calls the police on his cell phone and the two of them wait on the stoop in the cold until the patrol cars come. The officers send Mary and Dave back to their house where a detective slowly and quietly asks questions. The front door is wide open and through it Mary can hear the officer’s radios, voices blasting between abrupt bursts of static.

  “Is there anyone you can think of that might want to hurt the Kirkman’s? Did either of them mention an argument or altercation with someone or maybe that they noticed someone watching them or their home?”

  Dave shakes his head. “No, but I rarely spoke with them. We weren’t really close. Mary? You talked to Mallory sometimes, right?”

  “The dog’s dead.”

  Dave awkwardly reaches over and places his arm over his wife’s shoulders. “Don’t worry about that, Honey. The detective asked you a question.”

  She can hear her husband’s voice, but it is muffled and the words don’t quite fit together. Plus, in the quiet places between the static she can almost make out something else. Another sound, something like language but not yet. Vibrations. Low and heavy and thrumming through her bones.

  “Mrs. Christos? Did you and Mallory speak often?”

  On the couch with the detective sitting on their ottoman, she can’t see past him to the front door. Neither man seems to be aware of the almost-voice coming from the Kirkman’s place. Mary Christos feels the shift of the veil. The weight of her understanding is too much.

  Fissures stretch across the once smooth topography of her mind.

  From those cracks leak black-red light that illuminates the shadow of something she could never before believe. Not even the wound of Nicole’s absence allowed her a glimpse. In a college philosophy course, she heard a riddle once:

  What is more powerful than God,

  More evil than the devil,

  The poor have it but the rich lack it

  and if you eat it, you'll die?

  Nothing. Nothing is the answer. Nothing is all that Mary Christos has to hold on to. Nothing is all Dave Christos has left.

  ~*~

  The discovery made, the police called, the stately homes and stately people blurred beneath waves of red and blue light, Sawmill Lane is as quiet as a cemetery on the moon.

  Mater Nihil temporarily sated by the game, the cyclical dance of the murderous mother and the massacred child crawls back into the rift between the worlds. The void is the womb is the mouth is the grave.

  Aborted into existence, Mater Nihil hates nothing so much as herself. Ergo, she abhors Being. If there must be something, then let that something be nothing. Let that nothing be total. Let the world and all those scrabbling cosmologies of festering physicality drown in their hungers until the last thing left is her beloved Ouroboros.

  Let the Serpent from the Beginning be the Dragon of the End.

  Let the Beast find peace between her thighs.

  Let Being burn so completely that it leaves no memory of ash, no imagining of smoke.

  Mater Nihil. Martyr Matriarch. Bride of Ruin.

  Yes, bride. Mater Nihil loves. There is only one who can look into the face of endless empty and find her desolation a welcome comfort.

  Frater Fractura.

  The Emperor of the Schism. Husband of the Chasm. The Arch-Architect of Omnicide.

  They loved. They made love. They made a child.

  Now, the Murderous Mother seeks her absconded daughter and the Father of Fire ponders his role in such a dilemma.

  The void is the womb is the mouth is the grave.

  Chapter One

  Detective Tom McBride stands in the driveway of the trendy suburban manse, squinting his eyes from the blazing and bitter October sun. At the driveway his younger partner, Asher Corsino, escorts the psychic from the passenger seat of his Mustang and the two amble up the driveway, shoulders hunched in the cold, steaming paper cups clenched in their hands.

  He spits into the frost coated yard. Above them the sky stretches out in desolate, whitish grey waves. Dead leaves clatter against the pavement. Their slow, languid amble makes McBride’s teeth itch. How dare they be so goddamn chipper after his ransacked morning?

  A grateful bachelor, McBride shares his modest townhome with a surly French bulldog named Saxby. Sunday is a day of rest for the detective and his dog. He has no overt spiritual beliefs, but he does appreciate the normalizing influence religious institutions provided the masses. He does, however, believe in normality and order, two traits that make him a particularly effective homicide detective. Solving the puzzle of a murder is often a matter of recognizing the anomalies and outliers hidden in the patterns of a person’s life.

  Whatever happened to the Kirkmans is unlike anything he has ever seen in his six years in homicide.

  Sunday is a day meant to spend in monastic contemplation of the self, of seeking that comforting uniformity of being that to some seemed like emptiness. It is the best sort of paradise: the kind unmarred by another living soul. It is the thing he anticipates every week and on those very rare occasions when his leisure is interrupted, the days that follow found him more irritable and withdrawn than usual.

  When Captain Landry called him at 7:16am this morning to ask him to play chaperone at a crime scene he is still trying to forget, with his rookie partner and a charlatan to boot, it took all he knew of silence to not curse the woman out. He arrived at 3842 Sawmill Lane twenty minutes ago to collect the keys from an on-duty patrol officer with nothing better to do in the placid environs of one of Boston’s most affluent suburbs. After waiting for fifteen minutes in his idling sedan, somehow incapable of finding a temperature that didn’t make his toes freeze and his balls sweat or his palms damp and his ears frigid, he got out of the car and stood on the stoop.

  “’G’morning, McBride.” Corsino holds out a paper cup.

  Hands fisted in his coat pocket, he huffs at his partner. “You do realize I’ve been here longer than you. If I wanted something, I could’ve gotten it already.”

  Corsino’s handsome smile wilts from his face and McBride is suddenly warmed by a flush of pleasure. “Besides, I don’t drink coffee anyway.”

  Asher shuffles his feet in what McBride suspects is some gesture meant to draw attention to his sexual organs, obscenely outlined by the rough fabric of his perfectly fitted jeans. What an asshole.

  “I know you don’t drink coffee, its hot chocolate.”

  The wind picks up and slices through the sensible layers of his clothing, shoves a savory whisper of warm chocolate into his face. He feels like a leashed dog as his mouth fills with saliva.

  “Oh, hell,” McBride mutters and takes the cup from Asher’s bare hand.

  Before allowing himself the pleasure of that first sip, he glances at the ground, then to the air between Asher and the psychic’s shoulders.

  “Thanks.”

  The burn of shame is strong but quickly turns tepid after the first sip. Had he been alone or with Sax he would’ve groaned with uncharacteristically unrestrained pleasure. Instead, he clears his throat and slips back into the armor of his aloof indifference.

  Corsino nods. “No problem. This,” he gestures toward the psychic, “is Samira Kirilyich. Did Landry already fill you in about her?”

  The psychic’s hair is short, choppy, floppy, and foppish. Crow’s wing black, wild in a variety of lengths, some strands falling past her shoulders right next to patches shorn so closely McBride can almost imagine the tickly prickle of the wiry hairs on his palms. The woman is ethnic; her last name certai
nly came from Eastern Europe, but her caramel-cream complexion belies a heritage bloomed from far sunnier locales. Exotic by some standards, her skin is strangely lustrous in the grey prison of the morning.

  She wears scuffed-all-to-hell military boots with frayed shoelaces, black cargo pants with the hems tucked behind the loose tongue of her shoes, a black leather belt dotted with vicious looking spikes, a grey hooded sweatshirt, and a creased biker jacket adorned with patches and buttons displaying a cacophony of lewd, disturbing, and at times repugnant phrases, images, and symbols. Gathered around her neck are chains and links of silver and steel, pendants of semi-precious stones peeking above her collar. The psychic’s facial features are a cross between feline and impossible. Pointed chin, full mouth, average nose, and –this is what makes his guts flip—almond shaped eyes with irises the color of electric violet. Such a color does not exist in nature. Framed by wisps of ultra-black hair, her eyes are preternaturally still and once he is looking into them he realizes with a flush of embarrassment that he cannot stop.

  “McBride?”

  He has never been more thankful for the junior detective’s voice. He blinks—did she . . . at all . . . even once?—and averts his eyes back to the space between their shoulders.

  “Sorry. Landry gave me few details. I still think this is ridiculous.”

  She has somehow bested him with her mesmeric eyes and it stings like a lash against wet skin. It is as if his inability to pull away on his own volition somehow gives her the power that was stolen from him. McBride is being juvenile but he feels edgy, distracted, consumed.

  For what it’s worth, the psychic doesn’t even flinch. Asher, however, puffs up like a rooster. “Well one detail I’m sure she made clear is that for the duration of Mrs. Kirillyich’s assistance with this investigation, we are to do whatever we reasonably can to help her.”