Until now, I had not returned to Burke & Bailey’s after that dreadful day. I knew that suffering can purify, that it’s a kind of fire that can be worth enduring, but there were degrees of it to which I chose not to subject myself.
The tables and chairs were gone, as well as freezers and milkshake mixers and other equipment. Attached to the back wall was the menu of flavors, topped by Burke & Bailey’s newest offering at that time: COCONUT CHERRY CHOCOLATE CHUNK.
I remembered having referred to it as cherry chocolate coconut chunk, whereupon she had corrected me.
Coconut cherry chocolate chunk. You’ve got to get the proper adjective in front of chunk or you’re screwed.
I didn’t realize the grammar of the ice-cream industry was so rigid.
Describe it your way, and some weasel customers will eat the whole thing and then ask for their money back because there weren’t chunks of coconut in it. And don’t ever call me adorable again. Puppies are adorable.
At the end of the long counter, I opened a low gate and entered the work area from which Stormy had been serving customers when the shooting started. The flashlight revealed vinyl tiles littered with plastic spoons, pink-and-white plastic straws, and dust balls that quivered away from me as I moved.
I relied on intuition to stop at the very place that Stormy had been standing when she’d been cut down. The stains underfoot were more than a year and a half old, and I considered them only briefly before moving past them and sitting on the floor.
This was the still point around which my life turned, the axis of my world. Here she had died.
I switched off the flashlight and sat in darkness so complete that it seemed as if all the light had gone out of the world and would never return.
After her death, her spirit had lingered for some days this side of the veil. My grief was so heavy, so bitter, that I couldn’t endure it, and for a while I lived in denial. Lingering spirits look as real to me as do living people. They are not translucent. Neither do they glow with supernatural energy. If I touch them, they have substance. They do not talk, however, and Stormy’s silence should have at once told me that her spirit had left her body and that before me stood the essence of the girl I loved, her splendid soul, but not the girl complete and physical. My denial was close to madness; I imagined conversations between us, made meals that she could not eat, poured wine she could not drink, planned a wedding that could never be consummated. By my desperate longing, I held her to this world days after she should have passed on to the next.
Now, sitting on the floor, behind the counter in the ice-cream shop, I spoke to her, unconcerned that with my paranormal talent I might draw her back into this troubled world. Those who pass to the next life do not return. Not even the power of love, as intense a love as any a man had ever felt for a woman, could open a door in the barrier between Stormy and me.
“It won’t be long now,” I said softly.
I felt that she could hear my words even a world away. That may sound weird to you, but stranger things have happened to me. When you have come face-to-face with a senoculus, a six-eyed demon with human form and the head of a bull, you grow more open-minded about what might and might not be possible.
Besides, I have no choice but to believe that all our lives are woven through with grace, because only then could the promise made to me and Stormy come true.
Six years earlier, when we were sixteen, we went to Pico Mundo’s annual county fair. At the back of a carnival-arcade tent stood a fortune-telling machine. We dropped a quarter in the slot and asked if we would have a long and happy marriage. The card given to us couldn’t have been more reassuring: YOU ARE DESTINED TO BE TOGETHER FOREVER.
Framed behind glass, that card had hung above Stormy’s bed when she still lived. I carried it now in my wallet.
I whispered again, “It won’t be long now.”
I don’t believe it’s possible to imagine a favorite scent, to recall a fragrance as vividly as one can hear a tune in the mind’s ear or see in the mind’s eye a place visited long ago. Nevertheless, as I sat there in the lightless shop, I smelled the peach-scented shampoo that Stormy had used. After a shift cooking in the Pico Mundo Grille, when my hair had sometimes smelled like hamburger grease and fried onions, she gave me that same shampoo; but I hadn’t been able to find the brand anymore and hadn’t used it in months.
“They’re coming to Pico Mundo. More cultists. Inspired by those who … murdered you. They aren’t content anymore with quiet rituals and human sacrifices on secret altars. What happened here has shown them a more thrilling way to … practice their faith. In fact, I think they’re already in town.”
No sooner had those words escaped me than I heard laughter in the distance and then voices echoing through the mall.
I started to get to my feet, but a blush of light rose across the face of the darkness, and I stayed below the counter.
Three
The voices abruptly grew louder when the new arrivals entered the former ice-cream shop. Unless others were present who did not speak, there were three of them, a woman and two men.
Fearing that they might lean over the counter or come to the end of it to shine their flashlights along the service area, I eased into a space once occupied by an under-the-counter refrigerator or other piece of equipment, into cobwebs that clung like a veil to my face and tickled my nostrils toward a sneeze.
As I wiped the veil away and imagined poisonous spiders, the woman asked, “What was the body count, Wolfgang? I mean in this store alone?”
Wolfgang had a voice perhaps roughened by countless packs of cigarettes and more than a little whiskey taken neat and therefore scalding. “Four, including a pregnant woman.”
I had thought they must have found the door through which I’d forced entry, the tools that I’d left behind. But they didn’t seem to be searching for anyone; evidently they had entered the mall by a route different from mine.
The second man had a soft voice, naturally mellifluous but too honeyed, as though he must be so practiced in deceit that even when he was in the company of his closest comrades and speaking from the heart, he could not change his tone to match the circumstances. “Mother and child taken together. Such admirable efficiency. Two for the price of just one bullet.”
“When I said four,” Wolfgang replied with a note of impatient correction, “I wasn’t, of course, counting the unborn.”
“Incunabula,” the woman said, which meant nothing to me. “It wasn’t in the newspaper count of nineteen. Why would you think it had been, Jonathan?”
Rather than reply, the corrected efficiency expert, Jonathan, changed the subject. “Who were the other three?”
Wolfgang said, “There was a young father and his daughter.…”
I had known them. Rob Norwich was a high-school English teacher who sometimes had Saturday breakfast with his daughter, Emily, at the Pico Mundo Grille. He loved my hash browns. His wife had died of cancer when Emily was only four.
“How old was the child?” the woman asked.
“Six,” Wolfgang replied, adding a sort of sigh to the end of the word, making two syllables of it.
I wondered who these people were, for what purpose they had found their way into the mall. Perhaps they were merely three more of those legions whose patronage made hits of torture-porn horror movies, on vacation and eager to satisfy their morbid curiosity by touring mass-murder sites. Or maybe they were not as innocent as that.
“Just six,” the woman said, as if relishing the number. “Varner would’ve been well rewarded for that one.”
Simon Varner, the bad cop, the gunman on that day.
Wolfgang had all the facts. “Her father’s face was blown away.”
Jonathan said, “Any chance the coroner determined which of those two was shot first, Daddy’s girl or Daddy himself?”
“The father. They say the daughter held on for about half an hour.”
“So she saw him shot in the face,” the woman said, a
nd seemed to take smug satisfaction in that depressing fact.
One of the flashlight beams traveled up the long list of ice-cream flavors on the back wall, which I could still see from the nook in which I hid, and at the top it came to rest for a moment on COCONUT CHERRY CHOCOLATE CHUNK.
“Victim four,” said Wolfgang, “was Bronwen Llewellyn. Twenty years old. The store manager.”
My lost girl. She disliked the name Bronwen. Everyone called her Stormy.
Wolfgang said, “She was a good-looking bitch. They showed her photo on TV more than any of the others because she was hot.”
The beam traveled across the flavor list, to the wall and down, lingering for a moment on a pattern of blood spray that once had been scarlet but was now the color of rust.
“Is this Bronwen Llewellyn important?” asked Jonathan. “Is she why we’ve come here?”
“She’s one reason.” The light moved away from the bloodstains. “Ideally, she’d be buried somewhere, we could dig her up, use the corpse to mess with his mind. But she was cremated and never buried.”
In addition to seeing the spirits of the dead, I have a gift that Stormy called psychic magnetism. If I drive around or bicycle, or walk, all the while thinking about someone—a name, a face—I will sooner than later be drawn to them. Or they to me. I didn’t know these three people, wasn’t thinking about them before they arrived; nevertheless, here they were. This might have been unconscious psychic magnetism—or mere chance.
“Who has her ashes?” the woman asked.
“I don’t know. Several possibilities.”
Their footsteps retreated from the ice-cream shop, and distance dimmed the lights they carried.
I came out of hiding, rose to my feet, and hurried to the gate at the end of the counter. Regardless of the risks, I needed to know more about those people.
Four
Revealed only as shadowy forms wielding swords of light, the trio moved leisurely toward the north end of the mall, pausing to fence with the darkness and illuminate one point of interest or another.
I dared not switch on my flashlight. Their conversation gave me some cover, but if I followed blindly in their wake, I was likely to step on something that would make enough noise to attract their attention.
My dilemma was resolved when a hand laid on my shoulder made me turn my head, whereupon I came face-to-face with a softly glowing man who had no face. Eyeless sockets regarded me from a mask of bullet-torn flesh and shattered bone.
After so many years of supernatural experience, I was by then immune to the sudden fear that others would have experienced at the unexpected touch of a hand in the dark. Likewise, the hideous face—or the absence of one—inspired no fright, but instead sadness and pity.
I could assume only that here stood the spirit of Rob Norwich, who had died in the ice-cream shop almost two years earlier, the father of six-year-old Emily, who had also died. If the child had moved on from this world, her father had not.
Never before had a spirit appeared radiant to me, and I thought he manifested in this manner so that, by accompanying me, he might serve as a lamp to reveal the way. Aglow or not, he could be seen only by me, and the light that he emitted, although it revealed the floor around us, most likely also remained invisible to Wolfgang and Jonathan, and to the nameless woman.
His face in death resolved into the countenance he possessed when alive, the wounds closing up. Rob had been thirty-two, with receding blond hair, pleasant features, and eyes the soft green of cactus skin.
He cocked his head as if to inquire whether I understood his purpose, and I nodded to confirm that I did and that I trusted him. The dead don’t talk. I don’t know why.
Quickly he led me to the nearby escalator, which was powerless now, only a staircase of grooved steel treads that angled over the dry formation that had once been the koi pond. I followed him up to the second floor, for the moment heading away from the creepy trio that interested me.
I feared that the escalator, so long out of service, would creak or clatter underfoot. The treads were firm, however, and they weren’t littered with debris.
At the top, I followed Rob Norwich to the right and then north, keeping away from the storefronts, staying near the railing beyond which, had there been more light, I could have looked down into the ground-level promenade. Here and there lay scatterings of trash, but guided by the spirit’s radiance, I was able to step over or around the debris without making a sound.
On the lower promenade, the suspicious trio halted, flashlights concentrated on something beneath the upper concourse on which I stood. Bullet-pocked walls, perhaps. Or an interesting pattern in a spray of blood.
Hoping that their faces might be at least half revealed in the backwash of light, I leaned against the railing and peered down at the group. But the angle was too severe for me to see much about them.
I don’t know what gave me away. I’m sure that I didn’t make a sound. Perhaps I disturbed some small piece of litter that rolled between the balusters and fell past one of the men below, because abruptly he turned his flashlight toward me. The bright beam found my face and dazzled me so that I couldn’t clearly see him or any of them.
Rob Norwich, my most recent friend among the dead, put a hand on my shoulder again, and I turned to him as, in the concourse below, Wolfgang shouted, “That’s him. Get him. Kill him!”
Any remaining illusion I had that these people might be mere horror junkies, touring the mall because of its bloody history, evaporated. Although they hadn’t known that I was there, they had come because they were associated with the demonic cult that I had infiltrated in Nevada, and this place inspired them. They were in Pico Mundo to honor the mass murderers who had shot up Green Moon Mall back in the day, to honor them by committing some greater atrocity elsewhere in town.
Because of the events in Nevada, they knew that I might be the only one who could foil them. This chance encounter—if anything in life occurred by chance—gave them an opportunity to waste me, thereby improving the odds that their specific intentions wouldn’t be known until it was too late for anyone to stop them.
My ghostly companion, who served also as my guiding light, hurried toward the nearer of the two abandoned department stores that anchored the shopping mall, the one at the south end. He must have had an exit strategy in mind for me, but I didn’t follow him.
Rob had been a good man in life, and I didn’t worry that his spirit might be malevolent. He was not intent on leading me into the arms of my enemies.
The lingering dead, however, aren’t entirely reliable. After all, for whatever reasons, in spite of the certainty that they can’t undo their deaths and that there is no satisfying future in the haunting business, they’re either reluctant to leave the beauty and wonder of this world or afraid of stepping into the next one. They are not acting rationally regarding the most important issue before them; therefore, trusting in them without reservation was even less likely to work out well for me than trusting an IRS auditor to help me find beaucoup tax deductions that I might have overlooked.
Now that Wolfgang and his two comrades knew where I was, they would most likely head to the south escalator, by far the nearest route to the second-floor promenade. I was unlikely to make it into that empty department store before they could cut me off.
Instead, daring to hurry through the darkness, I went north and made considerable distance before stumbling over something and knocking it aside, whereupon I heard the woman shout, “He’s going that way!”
I no longer had a reason to risk the darkness. I switched on my flashlight, cupping one hand around the lens to make it less visible from below.
As I reached the end of the promenade, I heard booming footsteps and rattling metal: someone running up the north escalator, which evidently wasn’t in as good condition as the one at the south end that I had climbed so quietly. Suddenly a light speared upward, searching for me, as the person on those stairs reached the halfway point.
T
he doors to the northern department store, pneumatic sliders, no longer operative, were frozen in the open position. I raced through them, into what had once been a temple to luxury goods, where the god of excess consumption held court. Many of the display cases had been left in place, and I ducked behind them, hunched and hustling, until I heard my hunters shouting to one another, and then I halted and switched off the flashlight.
Now what?
Five
My psychic magnetism worked best when I was seeking someone whose face and name I knew, though one or the other would usually suffice. On a few occasions, I had conjured in my mind the image of an object for which I was searching, and eventually I was drawn to it, though not in as timely a fashion as when my quarry was a person.
As the three hunters spread out in the department store, I pictured the pillowcase that contained a bolt cutter, a crowbar, and a hammer. I had left it just inside the door through which I’d broken into the mall.
When I felt the urge to move, I set out once more, hunched and scuttling as silently as possible. I followed the display cases, all with glass fronts and tops but with solid backs that would shield me from the cultists—unless one of them stepped into the aisle along which I traveled. At an intersection with other rows of cabinets, I turned right, moving steadily away from what little illumination the distant flashlight beams provided when they ricocheted off the walls and columns and glass displays.
Forward into darkness.
I had never before counted on psychic magnetism to make my way through pitch-black rooms, but only to lead me eventually to that which I sought. Now I decided that having paranormal abilities wouldn’t mean much if, on the way to my goal, my wild talent could run me head-on into a wall, send me tumbling down a staircase, or drop me into an open shaft. Surely I could trust it now, had to trust it, just like Spider-Man trusted his web-spinning ability to swing from skyscraper to skyscraper even though the briefest interruption in his production of spider silk could drop him eighty stories to the street below.