CHAPTER 12

You are a ghostly saint, Jane. The queen of hearts. The saint of shades. The golden-eyed cadaver. Strange cards in my fifty-two pickup and they all seem to have elaborate meanings, their very own mythologies. . . .

As it turned out, the members of the Obsidian Sanctuary knew Jane Doe. No name though. She was just a sweet, pale whisper that occasionally snuck into meetings. The strange albino. The pretty mystery. She never gave witness to the group, only hovered about, appearing and disappearing. No one could even remember exactly when she began showing up at meetings.

She was universally considered a good mystery, a healing presence in a room full of paranoid eccentrics.

Robin, the little girl with the white streaks in her hair, had been the victim of an unnatural event. Little Robin was broken, nearly comatose. Jane spent time with her, and though her wounds could not be erased, the pain was lessened and Robin came around, even talked on occasion.

She encountered a very bad thing, Jane, and now little Robin knows. The rest of them watch Robin. She is a canary in the dark.

Jane, the pale mystery, had talked to dozens of members, individually, healed all sorts of hurts.

I knew it was you, Jane, when they mentioned the peace they found in those golden eyes.

News of the girl’s death brought bitter tears. The Obsidian Sanctuary was eager to help.

* * * * *

“Subject: Jasper Eckman.”

Simon calls his name.

It’s the first part of the ritual.

The blue latex hug of the gloves is a welcome home. Snap.

The subject—a tall, balding thirty-three-year-old male—appeared to have died sometime after midnight. Simon has not checked the core body temperature.

Jasper leans back in an old wooden rocking chair, eyes staring at the ceiling. The exit wound, in the back of his head, gazes down, cyclopean, at the floor. A shiny chromed revolver rests in his right hand. Below his empty left hand is an audio recorder with a mini-tape inside.

Simon reflexively looks at his own digital recorder.

Surrounding Jasper and his chair, in an exact circle, repose thirteen cubes of rotting, congealing Spam. It’s an exacting circle of scabby cubes. A Stonehenge of false meat. A putrescent circle set with the precision of a Mayan calendar.

Through the green haze of the absinthe, Simon reads the apocalyptic meanings in the ritual circle of rot.

“It would seem,” Simon says into his recorder, “the Spam has been dead a lot longer than Jasper.”

* * * * *

“She hung out with Icky Knock’s crew,” said one Sanctuary member.

“They were looking into some freaky shit,” said another.

Ichabod Knock.

The thing about Mr. Knock, Jane, is he talked with his mouth full.

Simon had heard of him. In fact, one of Knock’s books, Illinois Oddities, haunted Simon’s bookshelf at home. Ichabod Knock, sometimes referred to as Icky. Collector of strange stories. Unlike most of his colleagues, though, he had made himself a part of those stories, bigger than those stories—the Gonzo occultist.

Books of urban myth and their authors can become urban myths themselves. Eh, Jane?

An apocryphal tale circulates Chicago, like the El, wherein a group of teenagers, eager for a thrill or a shadow of that thrill of youth and under-bed horrors, go out to test a story in Icky Knock’s book. It’s a local legend about a set of seven bridges that stretch over the hills and ravines between Collinsville and O’Fallon, bridges known as the Seven Gates of Hell.

They are not easy to find.

Consider that a dare.

The urban legends whisper that driving over all the bridges, in the correct order, opens a gate to the underworld. A variation of the tale says one must park under the seventh bridge at night, turn the lights off, and wait to be dragged into infernal dimensions by demon hounds. There are other versions. Urban legends split and branch off like cut, wriggling flatworm heads.

Why would anyone purposefully seek the gates of Hell? Impossible to say with certainty, but don’t we all occasionally do a thing simply because we know we should not? Haven’t you, dear loveling, ever sought the thing you cannot, should not, have? The soul seeks oblivion.

The imps of the perverse dance and whisper in the time it takes to open a door.

Acid Bridge is the name of the most famous of the seven. Supposedly, a group of teens, high on acid, drove off the bridge and crashed while searching for the seven gates. They burned to death.

This story was not new when Ichabod put it to paper in Illinois Oddities. Yet his books were always more detailed than their fellows—offering not just theory, but practical guides into the bizarre and grotesque. Ichabod Knock’s book is famous for giving extra clues on how to find all seven bridges and unlock their ritual. Ichabod Knock’s book is infamous for daring the reader to try these perverse games.

The book is even more famous for a group of kids who did just that.

As the story goes, a group of teens, armed with a dog-eared copy of Illinois Oddities, found all the bridges, even Acid Bridge, found all seven and even knew the ritual. They found the Seven Gates to Hell. Police found their car the next day, parked under the seventh bridge. The doors were all locked, but the car was empty. The teens were never seen again. A police officer, getting a closer look, fogged one of the passenger windows with his breath, revealing a phrase written on the glass by a finger smeared with oily sweat: Help Us.

You could finish the story by saying, “And the odometer of the car read 666,666.” That would be overdoing it.

Knock’s publisher is only too eager to collect the extra sales generated by such tragedies. Ichabod sometimes receives angry letters, but there is no such thing as bad press—certainly not with Icky’s stories.

Now practice the story in front of a darkened mirror. Tell it to someone at the pub. Tell it to someone you love. Tell it and tell it and then try—try to resist the urge to seek them out yourself, the Seven Gates to Hell. Because stories, especially folklore and urban legend, are dangerous. They spread and move and evolve. They’re living memes that flutter on dead moth wings. The soul gravitates toward oblivion, pines for the icy lips of the unattainable. There is a self-destruct button built into your circuitry.

Obsessions are born in the time it takes to open a door, the time it takes to tell a story.

And all—and all, and the imps of the perverse are whispering all the while.

* * * * *

The apartment buzzes under the rule of flies.

Dirty dishes, papers, unfinished food, disarray.

Name tags from every form of minimum-wage employment hang crucified on a bulletin board. A little graveyard of bygone jobs and each tombstone reads Jasper Echman.

But there is someone else in the graveyard.

“Jane?”

Pinned in the cork is a Polaroid. Bad lighting, not a great picture, but a photo of Jane Doe in life. Simon touches the photo. He carefully removes it, places it in a pocket. His hands shake. The Dead Water shakes. Jane withdrawal. Simon stares at the place in Jasper’s chest where a Y-incision wants to be—and shakes it off.

A blue-gloved hand carefully picks up Jasper’s audio recorder. A blue finger presses the rewind button.

Click.

Play.

Maybe the voice of the dead man will drown out the malevolence of the flies.

“Hello?” says a voice.

* * * * *

Ichabod Knock ran with a loose group of paranormal investigators. That’s what Nyx said. She knew of two who occasionally came to the Sanctuary: Jasper Eckman and Neil Barnes.

“The golden-eyed girl, your . . . Jane Doe, she was working with them on something important to Ichabod,” Nyx said. “We haven’t heard from any of them in a while.”

“They were looking into some freaky shit,” reiterated a Sanctuary member.

They were concerned, especially after hearing about Jane. Nyx gave Simon an address for Jasper. No one knew how to reach Ichabod.

“His literary agent came looking for him a few days ago,” Nyx said.

“So, Simon. I understand you want to find out what happened, to right the wrongs, etc. But why do you want to get her body back?” Nyx had asked this.

Actually, Simon had not told them everything.

Simon told Nyx that he wanted to know what mysterious things were going on at the morgue, that he could not stand to have more failed patients in the Dead Water, that he found Jane Doe to be too special a person to have her body defiled or desecrated or left to the mercy of whatever was out there. This was all true. Simon did not mention falling in love with Jane. He did not mention the kiss he shared with Jane. He did not mention wanting to keep Jane’s body after finding it.

Some things are private. Eh, Jane?

* * * * *

“Hello?” says the voice in the recorder.

Then comes the digital creak of a rocking chair in motion. The chair that dead Jasper still sat in. Simon looks to the chair, the still chair, but hears the chair in motion on the recorder.

Rock-rock.

“I—” stammers the voice. “I . . . uh . . . don’t know how to start this. I don’t even know who’s going to get this.”

Rock-rock.

“The others—we, uh, kind of fell apart. I mean, they never really liked me—I don’t think. You know? Things went sour after she left. She was kind of the linchpin. I mean, while we were looking into . . . huh. She was so . . .”

Rock-rock.

“Fuck! You’d think if a girl was that important to you, you’d know her name. No names. She made us promise that. We didn’t even give her a nickname. She was just there. I think—”

Muffled noises.

“What was that?”

Sounds of steps.

Rock-rock.

“Anyway. We’re scattered. Some of them might be dead. Assholes anyway. Neil—he’s probably doing his own thing. I think he’s the least screwed up. I think . . . I think he has a chance. And Ichabod—he’s lost it. I mean, the last time I saw him—fuck. He, he, he left us high and dry. Me? I’m like I was before the group.”

Rock-rock.

“She. Her eyes. I mean, Christ. She kept us sane. She had that way. Even when we were seeing things that, uh—”

Sounds of sniffling.

“She was a miracle.”

Rock-rock.

“Golden eyes . . .”

Simon squeezes the recorder, tries to wring more information out of it.

“Don’t know why I’m doing this. I don’t have a story. Not a good one. Knock’s got stories. Neil has stories. I’m just depressing. Meaningless. I . . . uh . . . that movie. You know that movie? That one with Bruce Willis? ‘I see dead people.’ Fucking hate that movie! Reminds me about my condition. Reminds me that Bruce Willis is just losing more hair. Both points depress me.”

Simon hears the flies of the present, buzzing around his head, and the flies of the past, buzzing in the recorder.

“Place is kind of a mess. Lot of flies. Kind of envy them. They eat shit and die in forty-eight hours, but I envy them.”

Simon’s eyes lock on a rotting cube of moldy meat and he falls into a putrid microcosm landscape, a spoiled universe, a lost circle of Dante’s Hell.

“Hey, Simon!” the Corbies caw.

Simon shakes his head, escapes an episode of monomania.

On the recording, he hears sniffing sounds, not sniffling, but as though Jasper keeps testing the air.

“Messy, messy place. My little friends all over, the ones that couldn’t help me . . . waste.”

Simon notices that, among the relics of pizza boxes, stands a copious array of air-freshening products: spray cans, candles, plug-in devices, and every shade of incense in the rainbow.

More sniffing.

“They sell opium-flavored incense. It’s true. I’ve tried them all. Nothing. I’ve plugged in, sprayed, burnt, even snorted them all. You can go unconscious off a big enough hit of potpourri. Nothing.”

“The meat, the meat,” say the Corbies.

Simon nods.

The Spam was laid out too specifically, too exactly. The rotting meat was not the disease, just another failed cure. But for what?

Banging sounds.

“Goddamn it! Thirteen! Thirteen cans. Swelling. Rotting. And I can’t smell the stink. What do I have to fucking do? They’re . . . they’re all around me right now. Just—”

Sniff.

“—just hanging in the air. Waiting. What are they thinking? I don’t fucking know. No insight. What the hell do you all want from me? What!? Just hovering around to show me how pointless it all is, right? No insight. No meaning to anything. Nothing. Not if—”

Fluttering distortions in the audio, whispers in the signal.

“Okay—the point. My secret. What would make a grown man sit in the center of a rotting ring of Spam? I smell dead people.”

Laughter. Sick laugher. Like something coughing up fish hooks.

“Yeah, I don’t see or feel or converse with the dead. Don’t have psychic contact with spirits. I smell them. Ha! Funny when you say it out loud, like a morbid little comic strip.”

Laughter. Something shatters.

“That’s my . . . hehehe . . . that’s my power. What’s it like? It’s oppressive—a sticky film over my life. Hard to describe. Always been there. I’ve never smelled anything else. Nothing. But they, uh, they give off, like, vapor trails. I smell them so strong it’s almost like seeing. I can tell the size and dimensions of them. Sweet rot. They smell like . . . I don’t know, like wet soil feels. Maybe human waste. Like—yeah, like a stomach-dropping fall. They smell a little like looking in the mirror on prom night and knowing you don’t have a date. Bouquet de l’entropie. Dust to dust in the nostrils. Ashes to ashes in the back of the throat.”

The Corbies caw in the wormwood tree. They want Dead Water. Simon feels the scalpel in his pocket.

“It’s always there. Always. Like a gross halo. Filters the rest of the world. It’s all rot! And it—no, no, no! Can’t even say it right. I’m not good at this. I’m not good at anything. Waste. Heh. Maybe, maybe it smells like rotten Spam.”

Sniffing.

“I wouldn’t know. Different spirits carry variations on the scent. Did you know that? I can tell. I can sniff them out in the graveyards—bittersweet regret. I can smell them at murder sights—the burnt-hair stink. Angry. I can smell them now. Close. They smell curious. They’re wondering what I’m doing. They reek of anticipation, too, like a demon trying to hold a fart. So fucking claustrophobic. They are all around—in my clothes, in my fucking pores.”

Simon notes the hands on Jasper’s corpse, cracked from compulsive washing. The face, dried out from too many harsh cleansers.

Sobbing now on the tape. A harsh whisper too close to the mic.

“Potential death. It, uh . . . it has a smell, too. Weaker than the real thing, but it’s there. I can smell the accident waiting to happen to some poor jerk. The elderly—Christ, the elderly reek of it. And it’s cost me everything. I can’t even hold down shit jobs. You try selling an order of extra-large fries to a fat old dude when you can smell death exhaust oozing out of his arteries.”

Sniffing turns to sniffling.

“Oh, she made it all a little better. For all of us. The nastiness—it was all farther away. She just had this gift to—Christ! And I . . . and I think it can’t be like this, right? There has to be more. Something! It can’t all be rot. Nope. That’s the worst part. Supernatural awareness with no insight. I know that there is an afterlife. They’re around me right now . . .”

More interference and crackling.

“There’s an afterlife and it’s all just a big stink! A miracle with no meaning. Waste. The soul is just the waste the living evacuate from their bowels when they die.”

Pause.

More interference.

Bitter laugh.

“Now all I wonder is: What will I smell like?”

Pregnant pause.

Bang.

Thump.

The recording goes on—on until the tape runs out—all buzzing and waves of whispering crackles and distortions.

Simon licks his lips. He wants it badly. The scalpel is in his hand. To feel the dead love, to know Jasper, to find out if a gun to the head feels like cold lips. The Corbies shriek.

“It’s not a good time,” he says to the murder in his head.

Trembling, Simon forces his junky hands back into his pockets and leaves the body of Jasper Eckman. From a payphone, he makes an anonymous call to the police, complaining about the smell. The crows sing rotating rhymes about Spam and death.

Maybe I should have gone to the Dead Water with Jasper. Maybe he could have warned me better about Mr. Knock. Eh, Jane?

* * * * *

Somewhere else.

Let us suppose there is a boy and his name is Neil.

Neil recently started his freshman year at college.

Neil turns on his MP3 player. Neil hunts specters, but never without his MP3 player.

He sets the volume to full, music pulsing through ear buds, as he creeps along the boards that, up until now, creaked. The music is loud and obnoxious. Neil is loud and obnoxious. But music should be irreverent on an errand like this. Sometimes, crude audacity is the only gauntlet you can throw into the void.

Neil sets his goggles to power, and the dingy walls disappear into spectrums of primary colors. He creeps through the house looking for the things: vicious intangibles, nasty abstracts. He hits a button on the MP3 player.

Next track.

“How can you do that?” someone from the Obsidian Sanctuary had once asked. “How can you shut off your senses when you know there is something after you?” Later, they would warn him to stay the hell away from Ichabod Knock.

“A spook hunter who relies on his senses is fucked,” he answered to the former. (He would ignore the latter.) The things hiding in the shade between molecules use your senses against you. That is not how you find them.

Music and the color spectrum dull the horror.

Somehow, the sound of baby screams choked in clotting gore seems less horrific when drowned out by the relentless urging of Led Zeppelin and “Kashmir.” He knows the spooks are making those sounds now, horrible squeals and dins that brew insanity—all just beyond the reach of his ear buds.

Somehow, the sight of an old woman hanging from a noose of barbed wire, swallowing her own intestines, fails to rip apart one’s sanity when it was broken down to indecipherable blotches of color, rendered in blocks of reds and greens, like an ancient video game. Neil knows they are making those grotesque manifestations now, as several colorful, indefinite blotches and shapes dance around him, on the other side of his goggles.

These mad, jabbering things, these primordial frequencies, they hunger for sensation. They want to taste blood, to bathe in vital fluids, to feel naked organs between their toes. They want to drink fear.

Neil deafens and blinds himself to all their chthonic tools.

He likes to imagine how frustrated this makes the spirits of sin and hate.

Neil has to wait, baiting the trap with himself. He has to wait until their frustration drives them to action, makes them mad enough to come out of the walls and take those sensations from his flesh directly. So crazed that they come just a little closer—closer to reality. And then the rest of the items in his satchel would come into play.

Neil is an exorcist and tonight is a school night.

Next track.

INTERLUDE:

The Key

I got the key.

Not gonna be scared.

Not tonight.

Didn’t even ask for a glass of water. Didn’t ask for an extra story or for my Mr. Glowworm nightlight even. I got Snot. He’s my bear. He’s got only one arm ’cause I tried this one magic trick one time with Dad’s electric turkey carver. Dad was pretty steamy. That’s ancient history. I was just a kid.

But I got the key.

I’m not scared, not tonight.

“Here I’m are!” I say to the dark.

I’ve had lots of nighttime-mares lately. Granpapa had a man-man talk with me. He showed me a treasure box. Said it was a “cigar box.” It smelled like Granpapa. There was a key inside. It looked heavy. It was a real key, not those little jaggy things Mom and Dad use to start the car.

I remember Granpapa said, “This, Jeramie, is a key made of cold-wrought iron—the bane of goblins, jabberwockies, and all things that skulk in the ever-dark. Anyone in the Old Country can tell you that. But this isn’t just a key, it’s the key, the key to the Other Place.”

I wanted to see the key with my hands. Real bad. But Granpapa wouldn’t let me. Said it was safer in the treasure box. It was important. He said, “Do ya understand, Jeramie? This key locks the great iron gates to their world, so no monster nor boogieman can harm ya. They can try and scare ya. They can howl at ya. But you can laugh at them, Jeramie, because ya know that the key is safe with me.”

Granpapa took a nap.

I snuck into his room, like a burglar man, and took the key out of the treasure box. Granpapa might get steamy, but I’m tired of being a crybaby. Now, I’m not afraid.

“Here I’m are!” I say to the dark.

Nuffin’s gonna scare me. Nuffin’s gonna whisper at my ear with voices made out sour milk and scabs and spider legs. Nuffin’s gonna bite me under my eyes.

Nope. I’m gonna sleep . . .

* * * * *

I wake up.

It’s still dark.

I yawn and kinda remember the dream I was having about using a flying car to slay a Jell-O dragon with planets inside.

I squeeze my hand.

Oh no! Empty!

I look for the key, but it’s real dark. Mr. Glowworm isn’t plugged in. I think I did a bad thing.

I pull the blanket over me and Snot. I hold my eyes closed. I make believe I don’t hear nuffin’.

Not the creaky, groany gate opening.

Not the dark saying, “Here we is!”

But I can’t make believe no more when the noises stop and I feel something tugging on my blanket. . . .

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JOSHUA ALAN DOETSCH once built a flesh golem out of grave-robbed parts and leftover Halloween candy. By strange chance, this golem is fueled by rejection slips. Every day it begs and it pleads, “Please, kind sir, keep me alive!” And so Joshua writes. You can thank White Wolf for making the poor golem go hungry for another day.

Joshua is from October Country, Illinois, but currently writes video game dialogue in Montreal. He has a fondness for fedoras, does a mean Christopher Walken impersonation, and, once upon a road trip dreary, wrote a blues song about necrophilia.