The Girl In Brown Who Walks Alone (Rough)

I held the thick black receiver in my hand and listened to the lonely, repetitive sound of the ring. Once, twice, then a voice on the other end.

"Hello?"

"Mrs. Craigmile Bolam?" I asked. "This is Detective Graye."

"Ah yes, hello detective. Have you new information for me?"

"I'm afraid not, ma'am," I had to admit. "That's why I'm calling. I'm afraid the trail has run cold."

"Is that so?" she asked, sounding only vaguely interested.

"Yes ma'am. In my professional opinion, the findings in Fiji are completely accurate. No foul play."

"And this is your final word on the subject, Detective Graye?"

"It is Mrs. Craigmile Bolam," I answered. "In my opinion, I don't believe she'll ever be found."

"Very well, Detective," she paused for a moment, her breathing heavy on the other end of the receiver. "I shall write you a check for the remainder of the money I owe you. You may pick it up within the hour." There was a click, and then the line went dead.




The Bolam house was large but in no way ornate. Just a simple, tasteful two-story home owned by people with enough money to afford the niceties but not enough to flaunt. The driveway curved from the street up to the front door and then around to the backside of the house. I left my car idling in the front, not expecting to be long inside. The day was chilly and gray with a wind that shot the cold right into your bones and then left it there for you to deal with. I shoved my hands into the pockets of my overcoat and made my way up the red brick stairs to the front door.

When I reached the door I noticed that it was slightly ajar. I toyed for a moment with the notion of walking back down to the car to retrieve the .45 I had stashed in the glove compartment, but I thought better of it. Mrs. Craigmile Bolam was expecting me. She had probably just left the door open as a way of telling me to come on inside. Nothing to worry about, I told myself. So I pushed the door open, cracking half a smile as it moaned with an eerie creek, and stepped into the foyer.

That's when the smell hit me. Wet and metallic, like liquid copper poured straight into your nostrils. It was a smell I remembered all too well from my time in the trenches. It was the wet smell of new death. Every nerve in my body shouted directions to my brain, pleading with me to turn and leave the way I'd come in. But there was three grand waiting for me somewhere in that house, and times were lean enough that I couldn't afford not to try and retrieve it, death be damned. So I looked around the front room for anything I could use as a weapon should combat become necessary. I settled on a particularly sharp looking letter opener on a table set to the right of the front door. It wasn't much, but it would do in close quarters. I gripped the handle tight, getting familiar with the weight of the thing, and began moving in the direction of the smell.

Just then a scream that would have put the fear up a banshee echoed through the house. It was piercing and full of pain, a sound of pure animal terror. Despite my better judgment I ran toward it, steeling myself against whatever depraved scene I was about to barge in on. Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw when I turned the corner of the front parlor and charged into Mrs. Craigmile Bolam's study.

Mrs. Craigmile Bolam was crawling across the wood paneled floor on what was left of her stomach, leaving a trail of blood behind her like some nightmarish slug. Her skin had gone white as alabaster and her eyes were wide with desperation and horror. She looked right at me as she tried to pull herself away from her attacker, but I could tell that her mind didn't register that I was there. She was dying, was probably in shock, driven only by her own ingrained need for survival. My own need for survival told me to leave that room as fast as my feet could carry me, but unfortunately for me my feet wouldn't be moved. At the sight of the thing, not the person but the thing, standing above the mangled Mrs. Craigmile Bolam my entire body froze to the spot.

The creature was tall and slender and the tattered rags of an aviator's flightsuit hung on it's ghastly limbs, which God as my witness resembled more the appendages of an octopus than those of a man. The beast had a head longer and thinner than that of a human being as well, tapering back toward the top so that it appeard as though a normal skull had been somehow stretched. It's skin was nearly transparent, and the whole beastly thing shown with a sickly green light the color of a murky pond. It caught sight of me as soon as I entered the room and with uncanny speed it shambled on what might have once been legs toward my statued position. By God's mercy, at that moment Mrs. Craigmile Bolam, in the final throes of her death, rolled her hemorrhaging body onto its back and impeded the creature's movement.

The monster slowed and I took the opportunity to slip to the right and step further into the study, narrowly avoiding a lunging tentacle arm. I knew at that moment that if I didn't act I would surely perish as Mrs. Craigmile Bolam had, so with all my strength and all my speed I lunged forward and plunged the letter opener into what I took to be my adversary's throat. The impromptu blade pushed through the creature's skin in the same way a kitchen knife goes through an aspic. Wounded, the thing let out a shriek the likes of which I've not heard since, and flailed its weapon arms viciously about. I was caught with an errant blow and tossed backward into the fireplace, wrought iron tools for building and stoking fires clattering around me. My postal dagger fell loose from the creature's luminous skin, letting forth a font of thick black ichor that I could only imagine was blood.

Though wounded the abomination turned and advanced again, screeching and angry. Frightened as I was, this time I did not freeze. I simply reached out to my side and let my hand close on the satisfying weight of the cold iron poker. Whatever this thing was I had proven it could be wounded, could be made to feel pain, and that meant it could be killed. So I waited, as a spearman awaiting the charge of the mounted knight, and at the last possible second I jabbed upward and drove the poker straight through the creature's skull. It's evil declarations of animal intent were silenced instantly and the bulk of it collapsed in a near gelatinous heap before me. Not willing to take any chances, I stood and bashed the thing with the poker until it looked like little more than fabric floating in a pool of ink.

I don't know how long I stood there before I decided to move. It was probably no more than a few seconds, perhaps a minute, but it felt a lifetime to me at the time. Eventually my brain accepted what it had just seen and, iron instrument of my salvation clenched firmly in my right hand, I crossed to Mrs. Craigmile Bolam's desk. Laid out neatly on top of the thick oak desk was a check in the amount of three thousand dollars made out to Mr. Samuel Evan Graye, my Christian name, a nondescript leatherbound journal, and a pen and inkwell. I folded the check once in the middle, slipped it into the right pocket of my coat, and then peeled open the leatherbound journal. Written on the front page in exquisite black calligraphy was the following:

The Truth: Amelia Earhart, Obsidian, Ltd., and the search for the Other World

(This is the first draft of a Lovecraftian noir inspired by Amelia Earhardt. I intend to expand it and hopefully submit it to Weird Tales sometime in the near future.)

Waking the Dead: Part Three

Waking the Dead
Part Three

Marcus stood just below the mantel. Though the polished reminder of his friend was inches from his head, he couldn't bring himself to turn and look at it. Whatever was inside wasn't the girl he was meant to wake. Julia was a vibrant, vivacious, full-figured woman. That thing on the mantel was just an ashtray.

He reached into his coat pocket, running his fingers over the thin stock of the index cards he'd slipped inside. The cards were meant to express what Julia had meant to him. Marcus hated every word of it. To him the cards were as void of life as the urn on the mantel. They could say anything he wanted them to but it wasn't enough. The card about meeting Julia his second year of college didn't really capture the way her laugh had been so infectious. Marcus could write volumes about the first time he tasted her banana bread pudding, but it wouldn't convey the way the smell of it from the oven made your head spin. He could fill twenty cards with how her humor and her cooking had got him through the lean years of his illness, but it wouldn't dull the pain.

Marcus pulled the cards from his coat and shuffled them nervously. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Amy approaching. She gently touched his arm.

"It's time."

He found a smile for her. Maybe between the two of them they'd find Julia's strength.

Waking the Dead: Part Two

Waking the Dead
Part Two

Amy excused herself from the small talk that had sprung up around the living room sofa. Those people were her family, but their need to silence their real feelings with idle chat was driving her crazy. She had to get away. So Amy made her way into the kitchen and was thankful to see it was empty for the first time in days.

The kitchen table was covered with half-eaten casseroles, desserts, deli-trays, the gastronomic detritus that marked a Southern house in mourning. She pulled a plastic spoon from a nearby box, peeled back the tinfoil loosely covering a dish of banana pudding, and scooped out a bite This was Aunt Milly's, she'd recognize it anywhere.

When she and Julia had been kids, their parents would send them to their Aunt's on a weekend just so they could have some privacy. Aunt Milly had always gone out of her way to make the time seem like an adventure and the girls had loved her for it. They would go on nature walks, watch scary movies, and gorge themselves on Milly's homemade delights. It was those weekends at Milly's that had inspired Julia to attend culinary school in Atlanta, to open her own restaurant in Athens.

Amy spooned more of the pudding into her mouth, tasting the familiar flavors of wafers, fresh bananas, walnuts, and there at her mother's table, tasting her sister's favorite dessert from her Aunt's kitchen, Amy finally allowed herself to cry.

Waking the Dead: Part One

Thomas stood at the back of the room, clutching in his fist a glass of watered down drink that had once been a scotch on the rocks. He felt numb all over and if someone had simply knocked the tepid drink from his hand it's likely he would not have reacted at all. Thomas hadn't reacted to a thing in three weeks. He'd tried, to be certain, but it was as if any ability to register love or loss or hope or pain or joy or sadness had left the world three weeks earlier, had checked out along with Julia. He'd tried getting drunk, tried fighting walls, and in one fit of desperate stupidity he'd even tried putting cigarettes out on his leg. Nothing worked. He was a living statue, a golem stripped of the spark of life.

He watched the room, his eyes glazed, his legs and feet aching. He felt as if he'd not sat down in months, years. People walked past him, turning eyes void of any real understanding on his lifeless form. He was a stranger amongst them, still too new to their world for any of them to offer true comfort, not that there was any true comfort to be had. So they shuffled quickly past, museum goers moving briskly past a wall littered with art they couldn't possibly understand.

The golem stood silent.

--This was the first of a three part exercise. We had to write one 250 word entry a piece about a friend, a family member, and a significant other. I envisioned a funeral where all three were the same person and the stories were being told from the point of view of the people related to the deceased. This is the first, the significant other.--