A Stark and Wormy Knight

  “But it does sound familiar,” said Ted. “Why is that?”

  “Maybe you read the file,” I said, knowing he probably had. The kid studied up on me when he came here like a Yankees fan memorizing all the stats of his favorite player. When it came to me, he could tell you the BP|RD equivalent of my on-base percentage or average with runners in scoring position for every year of my career.

  Hey, I said I didn’t care much about baseball, I didn’t say I didn’t know anything about it.

  I looked at the two of them. They were waiting expectantly. “Crap,” I said. “We’re not going to play cards, are we?”

  “Come on, tell about this Thursday guy,” Liz said. “If I know who he is, then maybe it’ll count for my list.”

  “Wait, was that back in the 80s? The guy with the magical grandfather clock?” Ted said. “I think I remember…”

  “Just shut up,” I suggested. “And keep it shut. I’m the one telling the story.”

  * * *

  It was the first time I’d been on the California coast above San Francisco. It’s interesting how quick you can go from a place packed with people and lights and car horns and things like that to the middle of nowhere. Once you get about an hour or so north of the Golden Gate Bridge, most of it’s like that — the kind of place where you realize you’ve been listening to the seagulls and the ocean all day and not much else. Or at least that’s how it was when I went to Monk’s Point back in early March of 1984. Maybe it’s different now.

  Albie Bayless met me off the BPRD plane at Sonoma County Aiport. Bayless was a former reporter with the San Francisco Examiner who’d retired to his hometown a few years back and taken over the local shopper, the Monk’s Point Beacon. He’d had some past contact with the BPRD and me – you remember that Zodiac guy, the murderer everyone says he was never caught? No, nobody knows the BPRD had anything to do with that — I didn’t file an official report on that one. Probably never will. Anyway, when Bayless stumbled onto the weird death of Rufino Gentle and what happened after, he called my bosses at the bureau and suggested they send me out to have a look-see.

  Bayless was wearing shorts and had grown a beard. He looked a good bit older and saggier than the last time I’d seen him, but I was there to work with him, not marry him. “Still got that bad sunburn, I see,” he said as I came down the ladder. Funny guy. I squeezed into the passenger seat of his car and he filled me in on details along the way. The town was called Monk’s Point because there used to be a Russian monastery out on the rocky headland overlooking a dent in the coastline called Caldo Bay. The population of monks had dwindled until the last of them went back to Russian at the end of the 19th century. Later the monastery was turned into a lighthouse when the Caldo Bay fishing industry hit its stride. Those glory days passed too, and the lighthouse was decommissioned in the 1960s. The property on the point now belonged to some out-of-town rich guy who hardly anybody ever saw. But the place itself had a bad reputation going back even before the Russians arrived. The local Indians had been a tribe called “Zegrado”, which, Bayless informed me cheerfully, was a corruption of the Spanish word for “cursed.”

  As I discovered, “cursed” and “dying” were the two words that seemed to come up often in almost any conversation about Monk’s Point. The reasons became clear when we drove through the center of town, a handful of weathered plank buildings beside a tiny harbor at the mouth of a little dent in the coastline called Caldo Bay. There were half a dozen stores and a coffee shop and a bar, plus a few more places that looked like they’d been boarded up for a while. I doubt there were a thousand people in total living there. Things had gone downhill since the cannery closed. The town’s young people were leaving as soon as they were old enough, and except for Albie Bayless, no one was moving back in.

  “Everybody always says the place is dying,” Bayless told me. “But they still get upset when someone actually dies — at least when there’s no good explanation for it. That’s what happened here last week. A kid named Gentle – Rufino Tamayo Gentle, how’s that for a name? — was out here with some friend. I guess Gentle and his buddies were troublemakers by small town standards, but nothing too bad, a couple of busts for pot and loitering, some suspicion of breaking into tourist’s cars. Anyway, on a bet, young Gentle climbed over the fence and went up to the famous haunted house. His friends waited for him. He never came back, never showed up for school. One of the kids mentioned it to a teacher. Result was, a local cop came by, cut off the bolt and walked up to the house. He found young Gentle standing on the front path, head slumped like he’d fallen asleep standing up. Body was stone cold — he’d been dead for hours.”

  “Standing up?”

  “That’s what the cop swears. He’s not the type to make things up, either.”

  “You said one of the kid’s friends told a teacher. What about Gentle boy’s parents? Didn’t they notice he didn’t come back?”

  Bayless smirked. “You’ll have to meet the kid’s dad. There’s a piece of work.”

  “Okay,” I said, “‘dead standing up’ is definitely an interesting trick, but it isn’t why you called us, is it?”

  “Nope. That would be ‘Rufino’s ‘Escape.’ But first I’m gonna take you to my place, get you some dinner.”

  Just a half mile or so past the not-so-bustling downtown, Bayless pulled up to a gate across a private road. It was surrounded by weeds and sawgrass and looked like it didn’t get opened much. Beyond it a long, curving driveway led away toward the top of the hill. The house itself, the ex-monastery, was mostly hidden from view behind the headland, but the lighthouse loomed in clear view, pale as a mushroom. The windows at the top went all the way around, but the impression was nevertheless of someone looking away from you, staring out over the sea – someone you didn’t want to disturb, and not just out of courtesy.

  “I don’t like it,” I said.

  “You’re not alone,” said Bayless. “Nobody likes it. Nobody ever has. The local Indians hated the place. The monks only stayed about thirty years, then they all went back to Russia, saying the place was unholy. Even the guy who owns it now hardly ever shows up.”

  Albie Bayless lived in a mobile home on the outskirts of town – not a trailer, but one of those things that look pretty much like a house with tin sides. He kept it up nice, and he wasn’t too bad a cook, either. As I listened to him I spooned up my bowl of chili. He made his with raisins and wild mushrooms, which actually worked out pretty good.

  “The reason the dad didn’t report his son missing is that he’s a drunk,” Albie said. “Bobby Gentle. Supposedly an artist, but hasn’t sold anything that I know of. One of those ex-hippie types who moved here in the late sixties. Kid’s mother left about five or six years back. Sad.”

  “But that’s not why you called us.”

  “I’m coming to it. So they found the kid dead, like I told you. No question about it. No pulse, body cold. Took him to the local medical examiner over in Craneville and here’s the good part. The body got up off the examination table, sort of accidentally slugged the examiner – it was thrashing around a lot, I think – and escaped.”

  “So he wasn’t actually dead.”

  Albie fixed me with a significant look. “Think again, kimo sabe. This was after the autopsy.”

  That didn’t sound good at all. “After?”

  “Yeah. Chest cracked and sewn up again. Skull sawed open. Veins full of embalming fluid.”

  “Jesus. That’s nasty.”

  “Imagine how the guy felt who’d just done the sewing.”

  “And you’re sure the coroner’s not in on some body-selling scam?”

  “Kind of a stupidly vivid story to tell if you don’t want to attract attention, don’t you think?”

  I had to concede that one. “Okay, so the kid goes to Monk’s Point lighthouse on a dare, dies standing up, then walks off the autopsy table and runs away. Weird. Anything else?”

  “Oh, yeah. You see, I was already doing research
as soon as I heard about the boy being found dead. I didn’t know him, but I thought it might make an interesting wire service piece – you know, ‘Old ghost story haunts modern murder’…”

  “Old ghost story?”

  “Like I said, everybody’s scared of this place, and it turns out there’s good reason. A lot of weird stuff’s happened there and in the area just around it, going back as far as I can research, everything from noise complaints to murders, old ghost stories and local kid’s rhymes and other odd stuff, even some UFO sightings. It kind of goes in cycles, some years almost nothing, other years things happening a few times a month. It began to remind me of some of the places you told me about back in San Francisco, when we were working on, y’know…”

  “I know,” I growled. “Don’t remind me.” I took out a cigar. “You mind?”

  “Go ahead.” Albie got up and opened the window.

  I could hear the frogs outside kicking up their evening fuss, and, dimly, the sound of seabirds. “I think I want to have a look at the place close up.”

  * * *

  I stood in front of the gate. The lighthouse was nothing much more than a big dark line blocking the stars like paint. “I think I’m going to have a look around. You were going to tell me something about the guy who owns the place.”

  Bayless pulled his jacket a bit tighter. It was cold for the time of year. “Grayson Thursday. It’s been in his family for a long time. He’s hard to get hold of, but he’s supposed to see us the day after tomorrow.”

  “Good enough,” I said. “See you in the morning.”

  “Are you sure you want to do that?” He looked upset, but I didn’t know whether it was because he was scared for me or he’d been looking forward to the company. “What if you’re not back in the morning?”

  “Tell the children that Daddy died a hero.” I ground out my cigar on the gravel driveway, then vaulted over the gate. “See ya, Albie.”

  The local real estate market wasn’t losing anything by having the Monk’s Point property in the hands of one family. It was kind of butt-ugly, to tell the truth. As I came around the headland so I could see the buildings properly, my first thought was, So what? There really wasn’t much to it — the lighthouse, plain and white as vanilla, and a big, three-story barnlike structure with a few other outbuildings pushed up against it like they were all huddled together against the hilltop wind. Still, my feelings from earlier hadn’t changed: something about the place, as subtle as a trick of light or angle of land, made it easy not to like. In the dark it had a thin, rotten sheen like fungus.

  I stopped on the pathway in front of the barnlike building’s front door, figuring this must be where the kid had ended up. I looked around carefully, but couldn’t see anything that was going to stop someone’s heart. The front door was locked, but the pockets of my coat were full of remedies for a problem like that, and a few moments later I was inside, swinging a flashlight around.

  If this Thursday guy and his family had hung on to the house for a while, it looked like it was mainly to keep their old junk. It was like some weird flea market, with the stuffed heads of deer and other wild animals on the wall, with dozens of other examples of the taxidermist’s art in glass cases or stands all over the huge front room, even a stuffed Kodiak bear looming almost ten feet high on its hind legs. The shelves were piled with books and curios, an old pipe organ stood against one wall, and a grandfather clock the size of a phone booth stood against another. Some of the junk actually looked kind of interesting and I strolled around picking things up at random – a model sailing ship, a conch shell the size of a tuba, some giant South American beetles that had been preserved and posed and dressed like a mariachi band. Three quarters of an hour or so passed as I wandered in and out of the various rooms, some of which seemed to have been dormitory rooms for the monastery, all of which seemed to have the same kitschy decorator as downstairs, as though the place had been planned as a museum but never opened. I even walked up the winding stairs of the lighthouse itself, which was as bare as the rest of the place was cluttered. It didn’t look like the beacon had been lit in recorded memory — the wires had been torn out, the big lamp removed. I took the long walk back down.

  I looked at my watch. A little after eleven. I sat on an overstuffed chair that didn’t cramp my tail too badly, switched off my flashlight, and settled in to wait.

  * * *

  I may have dozed off. The first thing I noticed was a glow in the high windows, a sickly, pale gleam, pulsing slowly. It took me a moment to realize what it was – above my head the lighthouse had smoldered into a sort of weird half-life. I started across the room, but before I got to the foot of the stairs I heard a strange, rustling sound, as though a flock of birds was nesting in the high rafters. I stopped. The noises were getting louder, not just rustles but creaks, crackles, pops and snaps, as if the room was a bowl full of cereal and someone had just poured the milk.

  I swung my flashlight around. A stuffed seagull on a stand meant to look like a dock piling was stretching its wings, glaring at me. The deer-head on the wall behind it was straining to get loose, rattling and bumping its wooden plaque against the wall. Something moved beside me and I snatched my hand back. It was a replica of a Spanish galleon, its sails inflating and deflating like an agitated blowfish.

  “Oh, this is just CRAP!” I said.

  Outside the windows the green light was still dim but the pulses were becoming more rapid and the whole room was growing more wrong by the moment – the air had gone icy cold and smelled harsh and strange, scents I had no name for. I took a few steps back and something broke on the other side of the room with a splintering crash, then a huge shape came thumping and stumbling out of the shadows. It was the stuffed bear, walking like a stiff-legged drunk, swinging its clawed arms as it went.

  “You must be kidding me,” I said, but the thing wasn’t answering. It wasn’t even alive, just moving. One of its glass eyes had popped out, leaving behind a hole full of dangling straw. I stared at this for a half a second too long and the thing caught me on the side of the head with one of those swinging paws. It might have been stuffed, but it felt like it was poured full of wet cement. It knocked me halfway across the room and I’m no feather. Something other than the latest improvements in taxidermy were definitely going on, but I didn’t really have time to think about it too much, since the giant bear was on top of me and trying to rip my head off my neck. It felt like it weighed about twice as much as a real bear, and trying to throw it off was already making me tired. I dragged out my pistol and shoved it up against the furry belly.

  I emptied the gun into it. “No picnic basket for YOU, Yogi!” I shouted. BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! No soap. The thing just kept bashing me. Trying to shoot a stuffed bear — stupid, stupid, stupid.

  Eventually I rammed the thing through the wall and got its head stuck deep enough that I could finally pull myself loose. No sooner had I got rid of the bear than a tiger rug wrapped itself around my ankles and started trying to gnaw off my feet. The whole place was nuts – the paintings on the wall with their eyeballs bulging, trying to talk, the stuffed animals jerking around like they’d been electrified. I’d had enough of this crap. I kicked the rug up into the rafters where it hung, gnashing its teeth and swiping at me with its claws, then I made a run for the front door. I couldn’t help but notice as I ran past that the grandfather clock was lit up from within like a jukebox, glowing and, well, sort of pulsing. And the air around it was murky with strange, colored shadows which were streaming into the clock like salmon swimming upstream to spawn. Every one that went past me burned icy cold and made my skin tingle. It didn’t take much to know that this was the center of the haunting or whatever it was. It was pulling on me, too, a strong, steady suction like a whirlpool in dark, cold water. I had to struggle against it to reach the door.

  I was happy enough to get outside at first.

  The sickly glow from the top of the lighthouse was barely strong enough to light the long gra
ss waving on the hilltop, but it was enough to illuminate the thin shape standing at the bottom of the path, swaying a little, head hanging down as though in some kind of hypnotic trance. Whoever it was, they didn’t have a prayer against that stuff behind me.

  “Hey!” I shouted. “Get out of here!” I hurried down the path. If I had to, I’d just throw whoever it was over my shoulder and carry him…

  The first thing weird I noticed was that the Y-shaped pattern on the guy’s chest wasn’t a design on a shirt. I realized that because of the second weird thing – he was naked. The third thing was that the shape on his chest was made of stitches. Big ones. In fact, it wasn’t a guy in any normal sense at all – it was Rufino Gentle’s body, fresh off the autopsy table, standing just about where it must have been found in the first place.

  I’ve seen a lot of creepy stuff in my time, but that doesn’t mean you get used to it, you know.

  I grabbed at his hair as I got close and lifted his head so I could look into his eyes. No resistance at all. Nothing in his eyes, either. Dead — I’m telling you, dead. Not like you say it about someone who doesn’t care any more, I mean dead as in “not alive.” There was nothing like a soul or a sensibility in that corpse, but it was still standing there, swaying a little in the wind, long dark hair flipping around, a livid new autopsy scar stretching up past his navel and forking to both collarbones. When the wind caught his hair again I couldn’t help noticing that the top of his skull was gone, too, his brain sitting right there like a soft-boiled egg in a cup. He was holding the rest of his skull in his dead hand, clutching it like it was an ashtray he’d made at summer camp.

  I’d had a rough night. I don’t think anyone will blame me for not bringing Rufino Gentle’s body back with me. He looked pretty comfortable standing there, anyway, so I left him there and hurried down to the fence and Albie Bayless waiting in his car.

  “Did you see the lights?” Albie asked me, wide-eyed.

  “We’ll talk about it,” I told him. “Bur first I need to drink about nine beers. Do you have nine beers at your place? Because if not, I really, really hope there’s somewhere open in this godforsaken little town where we can get some.”