SS Corpse Vision (v5.0) Read online

  Spats rose from the sand, backwards, like a Charlie Chaplin film being rewound, shaking his fist at someone near on the docks. A flash of a knife, a dropped bottle of gin, some money clanging against the wood, and Decker opened his eyes, terrified of his waking dream.

  The next morning, he went to the lakefront as follow-up, at least that was what he told himself, and instead, he saw the sailors, washed up on the rocks, the air cold off Lake Michigan, and two little boys, standing in the middle of the corpses, fishing.

  That was when Decker screamed. The last time he screamed when he saw a corpse.

  But not the first time.

  The first time—Lord, he’d been ten. On his grandfather’s farm. His father had come back from the stream, looking grim, the female barn cat following him, crying plaintively. Decker should have followed his father, but he was already afraid of the man. So he went to the stream, saw the tiny kitten corpse on one of the rocks, touched it—the cold damp fur—and turned.

  The man behind him had no eyes. He was tied to a tree, his skin filled with holes, birds sitting on his shoulders and pecking at his face.

  Decker had screamed and screamed. His father had come first, pulled him away, told him he was a baby—he knew it was spring and every spring, his grandfather took the pick of the litter for barn cats and drowned the rest so the farm didn’t get overrun with cats.

  Someday, his dad had said grimly, this’ll be your job.

  But Decker only dimly heard the words. Instead, he stared at the dead man tied to the tree, the birds taking chunks out of his face as if he were a particularly delectable roast. Decker wanted to bury his own face in his dad’s chest, but he knew better.

  He also knew he needed to gather himself, to stop being so upset, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t. He sobbed and sobbed and finally his dad picked him up like a sack of potatoes and slung him over his shoulder, carrying him back, Decker hiccoughing, his father whacking his butt with every single hitched breath.

  His mother came into his room that night when he screamed again, the dead man alive in his room as a vision, running from men Decker dimly recognized. They would catch the dead man, carve him up, tie him to the tree, and laugh when they told him the birds would get him. They laughed. And Decker recognized the laughs.

  But that wasn’t why he screamed. He screamed at the sunlight afternoon invading his dark room, the trees no longer there leading down to the stream, the bank where he’d happily played just a few years before.

  His mother had come and shushed him. She had cradled him as if he were still a baby, and rocked him, but she said nothing.

  Except when she thought he was asleep, she went back to the room she shared with his father—You promised, she said.

  I did not send him down there, his father said. He went on his own.

  You should have watched him.

  You coddle him.

  He doesn’t need to see.

  At his age, I was drowning kittens. I had killed chickens and butchered pigs. I fished. You deny him childhood.

  That isn’t childhood, she said. See what it has done to you.

  You used to love me, his father said.

  Before the darkness ate you, she said. Before it ate you alive.

  ***

  “You could spend your whole life in escape,” the old man said, again misusing idioms. It was the odd choice of words that brought Decker back to the Dôme, not the fact that he wanted to be back.

  The men from the transatlantic review had left. In their place, a group from the Herald. One of the reporters tipped his hat to Decker, who nodded. He couldn’t for the life of him think of the man’s name.

  “Each place will be new and fresh until death,” the old man said. “Then you will see—and in Europe, there is much death to see.”

  “I’m not seeing corpses,” Decker said before he could stop himself. Not that he admitted anyway. He drank too much to remember what he saw. And what he did remember the old man called backwards nightmares.

  “You are not looking,” the old man said. “You have deliberately blinded your most important eye.”

  Decker was getting a headache, and he was starting to wish for a drink. This had been a mistake. He didn’t like being sober, not any more.

  “You lied,” Decker said. “You said you had a story for me. This whole meeting has been nothing but gibberish.”

  He stood, conscious of how odd he felt. He didn’t want to be near these men. He didn’t want to be at the Dôme. He wanted to talk to his mother, and she was thousands of miles away, probably worrying about him, like she did. She worried.

  She thought he could outrun the family curse. The old man just said he couldn’t.

  Decker didn’t want to think about any of it.

  “We will be here tomorrow night,” the old man said.

  “I won’t,” Decker said.

  “Unless you finish the story,” said the younger man.

  “We would love to read it,” the old man said.

  “Sure,” Decker said. And he would love to start over, that fresh bright attitude he had brought to Paris so far gone that he couldn’t even remember how it felt.

  Maybe he could recapture it somewhere else. He had heard nice things about Vienna. There was another sister paper in Geneva—or maybe that was a sister to the Herald. United Press operated out of most countries.

  He could leave in the morning. He didn’t need the language skills. He hadn’t had all that many in France. Besides, French was the language of diplomacy. He spoke it just badly enough for people to take pity on him.

  He was going to go speak it badly now at the nearest bar he could find. He would speak it until he couldn’t talk any more, until he didn’t think about all the things the old man had brought back into his mind. He would be so bleary-eyed drunk that maybe he wouldn’t even dream.

  ***

  But he made the mistake of stopping in his room first. He wanted more cash, which he found rolled up in his socks in the bottom drawer of the shabby bureau. Anyone would know to look in the sock drawer for money. It was a testament to how honest the staff was at the Hôtel de Lisbonne that no one had stolen his stash.

  How honest or how lax. He couldn’t remember the last time they cleaned his room.

  He wiped a finger over the typewriter, removing dust. His eye caught the edge of that paper.

  …the…

  He sat down, xxed out the “the,” and typed:

  Sophie Nance Brown, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Harcourt Brown lately of Newport, Rhode Island, in what the police initially reported as a bungled suicide attempt.

  (Although, he thought, how could it have been bungled if she did indeed die?)

  The body, discovered by an American tourist, fell on the walkway beneath the Pont Neuf. A witness claimed she had jumped off the bridge’s wide stone railing, laughing as she fell.

  But the American tourist contradicted these things, saying no one could have seen her fall. He found her at 7 a.m. Any witnesses would have had to been on the bridge in the middle of the night.

  The American also pointed to her missing stockings and mismatched shoes. Her traveling companion, one Eleanor Rose Stockdale of Battle Creek, Michigan, said Miss Brown had never traveled anywhere without her St. Christopher’s medal and her grandmother’s solid gold wedding ring, both missing.

  Police now believe Sophie Nance Brown is the third victim of a killer who play tricks on investigating officers. The witness who claimed she had fallen matched the description of a man seen carrying an unconscious woman to the base of the bridge around midnight.

  Anyone with information about this most interesting case should contact the Prefect of Police.

  Decker stared at the words. The paper did indeed come out of the platen curled, but he didn’t care. The story was good enough for the Trib, if it published crime news like that (which it did not, afraid it would scare the tourists). But the story wasn’t really good, just good enough.

  He had written
the facts as he had been trained. But that wasn’t what he knew.

  What he knew was this:

  The woman discarded at the foot of the bridge looked uncomfortably young. Her brown hair was falling out of Gibson Girl do, now horribly out of fashion, her lips painted a vivid red. Part of the lip rouge stained her front teeth. If she were alive, she would turn away from him, and surreptiously rub at that stain with her index finger.

  She had turned away from him and wiped at the stain, the very first time she had seen him. Sophie Nance Brown, of Newport and Westchester and points south. Sophie Nance Brown with the laughing eyes, who said she had come to Paris for the adventure.

  But her index finger was broken, bent backwards at an angle painful to look at, even now, when he knew she could feel nothing.

  She had felt something. She had felt too much something when she went to the bridge after a long dinner on the Right Bank with friends. She wanted to feel the breeze in her hair, look at the moonlight over the Seine. She asked her traveling companion, Eleanor Rose Stockdale of Battle Creek, Michigan, to accompany her, but Eleanor Rose, a sensible girl, had heard that nice people did not stand on the bridges at night and had declined.

  Later, Miss Stockdale would say she thought saying such things would discourage Miss Brown, but other friends said nothing discouraged Miss Brown when she set her mind to something.

  Miss Brown had met a young man who had captured her fancy. Her interest in him was what she wanted to discuss with her friends at dinner. Knowing him had caused an ethical dilemma for her, especially since she was so far from home. He lived alone in a solitary room in one of the more disreputable hotels near the Sorbonne.

  Miss Brown worried that she was too old-fashioned for the new morality, but too young to press the young man into something less exciting, something more permanent.

  Instead of listening to her, Miss Brown’s friends teased her “mercilessly.” They laughed their way through dinner, interrupting her, until she grew angry, threw down her napkin along with a few francs and left the restaurant, heading for the Pont Neuf.

  The Pont Neuf was suggestive, Miss Stockdale said, because Miss Brown found it romantic.

  Miss Brown stood in the center of the bridge, peer out over the Seine at the famed lights of Paris, thinking that no woman should stand in such a spot alone. The light played with her old-fashioned hairstyle and her modern clothing, her ankles nicely turned out, the skirt accenting her shapely legs.

  He had noticed that. He had noticed the contradiction from the start.

  Decker paused, his wrists aching. He had them bent at an odd angle. His headache had cleared for the first time since he started drinking in Paris.

  He wasn’t writing news any longer—or at least, he wasn’t writing news that he recognized. He was writing something else, seeing something else, something he didn’t want to think about.

  The pages had piled up on the small desk beside his typewriter. The voice was odd. It wasn’t his, and it wasn’t exactly the voice of impartial journalist. He was edging into something else, something his editors would disapprove of—“worried” and “thinking” and “noticing”—actual viewpoints, which were not allowed in the dispassionate prose of journalism.

  Decker rolled another sheet of paper in the platen, ready to type that damning “the” again, ready to leave it, and count all of this as an aberration.

  Instead, he continued:

  He had watched her since she got off the boat. She wore a wide brimmed hat with a red ribbon, fanciful and old-fashioned. Her clothing hinted at a girl who wanted to break out of the old ways, but her hair spoke of a girl who cherished what had come before.

  Almost Parisian. Modern, yet grounded in the past. He loved his city, and he wished others would as well. But he did not love the tourists, particularly the American ones, with their loud braying laughter and their lack of manners.

  Although they grew their women tall and beautiful in America. Solid women, with high cheekbones and flashing eyes.

  He followed her to her hotel, then watched her, meeting her first on the Champs Elysées, then finding her in the Tuileries, regaling her with stories of his novel—every young man in Paris these days had a novel—his notebook clutched in his hand….

  Decker stopped. Those memories, the things he saw, they weren’t his? He frowned, trying to see something else, trying to remember when he had first met her. The date—

  He dreamed of her. He dreamed of her, after he had found her. Six months into his stay in Paris.

  Six months.

  But he had never seen her, touched her, laughed with her. He hadn’t really encountered her until he saw her half-naked foot hanging off the walkway, her shoe dangling over the sparkling waters of the Seine.

  Only it wasn’t her shoe. The killer changed the shoes. That was his little joke. He tossed her sensible shoes in the water and gave her little Parisian heels, delicate shoes that he had bought just for this purpose….

  Not Decker. Him,

  Etienne Netter, whose apartment in the Seventh Arrondissement had been in his family for six decades. His parents long dead, his mother distressed when he came home from the War with “haunted eyes.”

  “But at least I am home, Mother,” he said plaintively, when so many young men had not come home. She had not seen what he had seen, how the blood turned French fields into mud, all for the sake of a few meters of advancement that would probably be lost the following day.

  They said the Americans changed it all, with their energy and their numbers and their willingness to get killed. The Americans, big and hearty, like their women, who were stupid but lucky and somehow managed to end the war.

  They liked him, these American women. They thought him their pet Frenchman. They thought his accent “quaint,” his smile “romantic,” his desire to write novels “almost American,” even though the French had been writing novels before America was a country.

  He charmed them, relaxed them, promised them he would show them the sights—and he did. He did. He showed them their own venal faces in the Seine before he raised their skirts, ripped off their stockings, and proved to them that French men hadn’t lost all of their dignity in the trenches.

  His mother, before she died, said he had lost his soul on the battlefield, that he had come home a shell, not a man at all, filled with dark compulsions not French. She tried to take him to church, but he would not go, not even to her funeral, after she had died, stepping in front of one of the automobiles that she so despised for ruining the lovely streets of Paris.

  Stepping—that is what he told the police. She had lost track of where she was in the conversation, and she had stepped—

  But she had not stepped. She had stumbled, after a shove, after she called him a monster, and said she wished he had died on the battlefield along with his soul.

  Sometimes he thought she was right. He had seen the darkness coming for him those early days in the woods, lurking beyond the tanks and the flying machines, past the machine guns with their rat-a-tat-tats and their spray of bullets, the bodies falling, falling, falling in the mud. Beyond that, the darkness rose over the fields and extended across Europe, and he saw it coming toward him, then filling him, until there was no room for anything else.

  He could pass on the darkness—he had done so with that beautiful American—but as he watched the hope die in her eyes, he remembered how that felt, and he could not, he would not, let her live with that. So he took the life from her, knowing (although she did not know) that it was no longer worth living.

  He had taken her St. Christopher’s medal because it should not touch darkness. He had left the medal and the ring she wore in the poor box at Notre Dame. He did such things, venturing into churches only for that, then escaping before the darkness polluted them as well.

  Sometimes he thought he should have stumbled in front of that automobile instead of sending his mother there. Sometimes he thought he should have died, just as she said, in the mud-and-blood soake
d fields, along with his friends. Sometimes he thought.

  And sometimes, he did not.

  Decker could not look at what he had written. He stacked the paper inside one of his folders and tied it shut with a ribbon, just like he used to tie the pages of his novel inside the folder, proud of his day’s work.

  This day—this night—he was not proud. He was spent.

  He had seen things he had hoped to never see again.

  Corpse Vision, the old man’s grandson had called it.

  Whatever it was, Decker despised it, much as the man he had written about, this Etienne, had despised the darkness in himself.

  ***

  As Decker walked to the Dôme the following night, the folder under his arm, he saw the darkness lurking. It hid in the shadows, wearing uniforms he did not recognize—that symbol the grandson had drawn—marching in lock-step.

  Nightmares seeping backwards.

  But Etienne had been a nightmare seeping forward.

  Decker winced. He did not want to think about it.

  He hadn’t had a drink in three days. His alcoholic wave was over.

  He also hadn’t been to the Tribune in three days. He wondered what Root would think, what Thurber would say. Maybe they were already searching for him, although no one had come to his room at the Hôtel de Lisbonne—or if they had, he had been too absorbed to hear their knock.

  This time, Decker arrived before the old man. Decker sat at the old man’s table, sipping coffee and eating ham, cheese, and bread, much to the disapproval of his waiter, who wanted to serve the coffee long after the meal was done.

  Know-it-all Hemingway sat in a corner, scribbling in his journal. He did not look up as Decker came onto the terrace, and Decker did not call attention to himself.

  But as he looked at Hemingway now, he saw something that startled him—an insecurity, a fear, so deep that Hemingway might not have known it existed. Superimposed over Hemingway—like a ghost in a Dadaist painting—was an old man with a white beard and haunted eyes. He hefted a shotgun and rubbed its barrel against his mouth.

  Decker looked away.

  The old man—his old man, not the spirit surrounding Hemingway—sat at the table, his grandson beside him.