The Secret of Ventriloquism Read online

“Oh,” Kroth said with a sparkle in his eye, “That, detective, is the Tree of Life and Death. From the Qabalah. Jewish mysticism, you know. What interests me most is the lower portion of the piece, the Qliphothic Tree of Death... or puh-perhaps False-Life would be a better description. After all, Qliphoth luh-literally means ‘husk’ or ‘shell.’ As above, so below. Growth even in death, and yet the life or, rather, the appearance of life is mirrored by its distorted image underground. As above, so buh-below. Please, take it, detective.” Pulling the illustration down, he placed it in front of me. “For inspiration. Excuse me.”

  Then Kroth pulled out a mottled, greenish steel oxygen tank from under his desk. He placed the tank’s black, opaque mask over his head—covering his nose and mouth—turned its squeaking valve and breathed deeply for what felt like ten minutes. Then he twisted the valve closed and replaced mask and tank back under his desk.

  “Apologies,” the librarian said. “I also kuh-keep a clean, extra shirt and jacket at work during this season. You see, this time of year I find by midday my original ones have become quite dingy. Clothing can be changed. Lungs, sadly, cannot. I am afraid the particulates in the atmosphere have done vuh-vile work on my whole system, causing no end of physical troubles. Coughing fits, shuh-shortness of breath. The worst biological changes. For instance, you do nuh-know the blood of the non-killed pollutant victim is literally thicker, don’t you?”

  Kroth lost me there. I just stared in response.

  “Ahem,” the librarian said. I think it’s the first time I ever heard someone literally say that word. Too bad. I was beginning to hate this guy.

  “Look, I’m running a little short on time, Solomon.”

  “Please, if you don’t mind, I puh-prefer ‘Mr. Kroth.’”

  I snorted in response. Yeah, no way was this stuttering, self-important prick getting a date, let alone getting into my pants.

  “Back to the matter at hand, then,” Kroth said. “The old mill and your, heh, ‘luh-little case.’ It’s a small suh-suh-city, detective. The word on the street, as they say—at least in certain quarters—is out ruh-regarding the oddly appendaged, skeletal corpses found buried in Treasure Forest, even if the luh-local media is still ignorant of them. Tuh-tell me, what makes you think the old mill has anything to duh-duh-do with them?”

  Librarian guy was now jiggling like a bunny rabbit afire, but it no longer seemed so cute to me. He had my full attention, though. Kroth had used the word “appendaged,” and that definitely rang a bell.

  “Well,” I replied, “Proximity for one. Whoever skeletonized those bodies would need some place to work. Somewhere isolated. Tell me, Mr. Kroth, you ever been out to Treasure Forest yourself, maybe in the mill area?”

  My question sent the librarian into a sudden coughing and wheezing fit that lasted at least a couple of minutes. When he finally caught his breath he said, “Go up there to the mill? No, nuh-no. Not for many yuh-years. The air quality there is...” He pulled his steel oxygen tank out and was soon huffing oxygen again. After he removed his mask, Kroth sneezed, and the librarian caught his snot with a fancy white, monogrammed handkerchief. I noticed its surface had become mottled with what looked like runny soot.

  “That area is positively ruh-ruh-wretched with particulate matter. And duh-dangerous for other reasons as well. For uh-instance, I happen to have direct evidence that the Factory wuh-was also connected to the tragic crash of Dunntown’s Pan Am Flight 389.”

  “Wait, the Factory was somehow connected to a plane crash here in Dunnstown? When?”

  “Indeed. One of the worst airplane duh-disasters in US history. Long before your time here. As the puh-puh-plane was about to land, it crashed into what was then the St. Peters public housing project on Tanner Williams Road. Not a mile from the old Factory. Killed all 285 passengers aboard. Cuh-created a dense fireball that consumed several populated street blocks. It’s tuh-tuh-true. It was just awful. Surprised you haven’t heard of it before, Detective. It’s a vuh-very famous airplane accident.”

  “Yeah, well, I hate plane travel, and personally I don’t get my jollies obsessing over mass fucking deaths.”

  “Puh-please,” Kroth said, with an index finger extended towards me, “Language.”

  I snorted.

  “There was,” he proclaimed (no other word for it), “a connection to a man who was living in the abandoned factory at the time. His name was Joseph Snavely, author of this manuscript here.”

  He handed me a small, rather crushed looking chapbook.

  “20 Simple Steps to Ventriloquism?” I said, reading the title. Looked like it had been printed using a typewriter on the verge of giving up the ghost.

  “Indeed. That puh-plane crash was Snavely’s doing, you see, at luh-least in some sense. It’s curious you’ve come in now, detective, buh-buh-because I’ve only just begun lobbying the federal authorities about the issue. My ruh-research indicates...”

  “Hold the boat, Kraft.”

  “Kroth,” he replied indignantly. Indignantly!

  “Whatever. Are you saying that this Snavely guy—this, uh, ventriloquist slash homeless guy—was some kind of domestic terrorist?”

  “Not quite, Detective. But I assure you he was no mere lesser ventriloquist. Mr. Snavely was a guh-Greater ventriloquist.”

  The capital “G” was implied.

  “Greater ventriloquist?” I replied. “They come in different sizes?”

  Librarian guy didn’t even crack a smile.

  The next fifteen minutes were spent pulling myself away from the pushy and—my guess was—batshit crazy Solomon Kroth. He warned me against investigating Treasure Forest, let alone the old factory. He also pushed the “20 Simple Steps to Ventriloquism” manual into my hands and insisted that I give it a careful read as soon as I could. Flipping through it quickly, I was starting to think that Kroth himself was the author of the piece.

  In the end, Mr. Solomon Kroth did indeed ask me to dinner “to discuss the muh-matter further.”

  I snorted again and replied with a “Yeah, that’s not happening... Sol.”

  When I made my way through the stinking aquarium of fog back to the cruiser, Guidry appeared. He was leaning against a nearby pine tree, stuffing his fat face with a cheeseburger, grinning—talking up some clueless co-ed.

  “So, how did it go, Raph? Learn anything?” Guidry asked with his mouth full.

  “Sure,” I said, crumpling up the occult illustration and tossing it and the manual into the cruiser’s trunk. “Oh, and I remembered something too. I hate librarians.”

  “Pfft. Big surprise, Raphie. You hate everyone.”

  - 3 -

  Detective Michael Thomas Guidry and I had been partners for the better part of three years—not long after I moved down to Dunnstown after all the ugliness up north. We made kind of an unusual pairing, especially in a small city in the ass end of Alabama. See, big surprise, but there aren’t many female detectives on the force down here—let alone in Homicide.

  Guidry, though, he was a strange bird. You’ve probably never heard that about him, but he was. People liked Guidry. He was good with them. I liked Guidry too. Hell, I loved him. No, don’t give me that smirk. I’ll let you in on a secret that’ll contradict everything else you’ve heard about the two of us. Guidry and I were never a thing. Yeah, Yeah. I know everyone thinks we were. Always did, even before all the shit went down. But I never even kissed the guy. Not on the mouth or anywhere else. Christ no. Guidry was chock-full of what they call boyish charm. And I find boyish charm repulsive—at least sexually.

  But you want to know about the case, not my turn offs. I heard about the skeletons for the first time about a week after I moved to Dunnstown, brand new on the force. Seemed that every year—usually around mid-fall at the foggy, farty height of the paper mill days—the Dunnstown second police district received duplicates of the following letter:

  To Whom It May Concern,

  As a longtime resident of Dunnstown, I wish to express my concern
at the expansive decrepitude that has infected the Municipal Park area. What was once largely a benign manifestation has become a malignant one. People are disappearing in this city—more of them every year. The elderly, the sick, the very young. The victims vanish on the darkest paper mill days and nights. These unfortunates are no longer alive in any normal sense. Their bodies have undergone a garish array of mutations. I do not understand the process they endured (or, perhaps, continue to endure), but I will describe their skeletonized remains from a visual perspective:

  1) Color, black.

  2) Skulls, normal. Visibly Homo Sapien.

  3) Heavy.

  4) Limbs elongated. Far too many joints. Hands and feet altered in a mockery of natural ones, appendaged like sea creatures or insects.

  5) Corpses measure between seven to twelve feet in length and three to five feet in width.

  6) Like an explosion from inside out, frozen in time. But all corpses intact, contained within their twisted forms.

  I have discovered where the victims are being taken and where their remains are interred. You may find them buried in Municipal Park, Treasure Forest area. Action must be taken before the next slew of paper mill days. Conditions will worsen. I suspect the corpses themselves are contagious. Protect yourselves.

  Signed,

  Anonymous

  This had gone on every year for the past ten or so. Of course, no missing persons had been reported, so it was considered a hoax. You might imagine how these letters played in the DPD. Around Halloween each year, the guys in Homicide—ever mature and sophisticated gents—spent a great deal of time “borrowing” plaster skeletons from various schools about town. They painted them black and attached ridiculous implements in place of extra limbs. These modified pseudo-skeletons were then placed strategically around the station. They’d use them to shock rookies or otherwise skittish detectives. Boo! A skeleton falls out of a closet. Boo! A skeleton pops up from under a desk. And then, man, would their fellow veteran-compatriots guffaw. Those dead-eyed good ol’ boys sure enjoyed their hi-larious pranks (“You been skeletonized!” they’d yell at their victims).

  But when they tried to shock little-ole-Yankee-ingénue-detective-me with one of those plaster skeleton jobbies? Well, one morning I opened the door to the armory, and one of those things sprung out of the darkness of the room at me. Without a screech or a flinch, I broke the thing in half. Everyone was real pissed about it. Except Guidry, of course. He just giggled and proceeded to take me under his sizable wing. He’d lost his own partner to retirement the year before and was able to pull some strings to make me his new bud-in-crime-fighting.

  Of course, even with Guidry as my partner, the others never accepted me as one of the fold. I was on the outside with everyone but Guidry. Which, of course, was more than fine by me. As for Guidry, I thought at first he just wanted in my pants, but he seemed about as physically attracted to me as I was to him. Believe it or not, I always appreciated that about Guidry. He just liked me. And, as silly as the man was (or maybe because of that), the feeling was mutual.

  So, the skeletons—the real skeletons. This past fall, my third in Dunnstown, ten Dunnstowners were reported missing for the first time. It was around the same time that we received our latest annual letter. Every damn one of the missing persons was a peculiar range of elderly and/or otherwise sickly folks. Last seen within the area in and around Municipal Park.

  Who bothered to do the thirty minutes of research it took to recognize the link between the letters and the disappearances? Me. Suddenly, our anonymous letter writer was a potential suspect—maybe for kidnapping, maybe for worse. Yearly hi-larious skeleton prank ritual ruined by yours truly. Yeah, I sure was Ms. Popularity with my peers.

  Not long afterwards, Guidry and I geared up and led a small group, combing Municipal Park for the bodies. And—boom—in short order we had our skeletons. Guidry came upon the first one by accident as he strolled down a fog-soaked Treasure Forest path. I remember him waddling ahead of me, grinning up at the smoky silhouettes of scorched, rail thin pine trees as if they were anything worth looking at. Suddenly, he fell flat on his huge belly, giggling, leaving me shaking my head and rolling my eyes in semi-irritated bemusement. When he got up at last, sweeping away the smoky crud that clung to the ground, he and I saw the thing more or less at the same time. Shrouded in a bed of discolored pine straw was a blackened human skull embedded face up.

  “Oh man,” said Guidry, in his south Alabama drawl. “Just like Motel Hell. Ever see that one, Raph?”

  Yeah, that was my Guidry: ever good-natured, even when it was unnatural to be.

  We found seven more bodies in the same position—buried feet first in the ground, skull-faces just above the soil. As the letters had indicated, the skeletons’ resemblance to human ones began and ended with the skulls themselves. The blackened skeletal remains gave the impression they had expanded below the dirt, outwards and downwards. And everything about the skeletons underground was elongated. Limbs, digits, even ribs and backbone just as described, terminating in crablike claws or the jointed, thin legs of an insect. Average length, twelve feet. Average width, seven feet. Just as Mr. Anonymous letter guy had described to the department for ten years running.

  I didn’t like touching those scummy things, even with the gloves. No one did. The bones were a deep black color inside and out and were heavier than they should’ve been by half. It was for this reason that I didn’t think at first they were authentic bones at all. My first thought was that they were maybe composite pieces of metal welded together by a talented but whacked out local artist. This was, of course, before Forensics later verified that the skin, blood and organs found within the marrow of each skeleton were in fact consistent with individual—not composite—human bodies. DNA evidence also eventually ID’d four of our ten missing persons among the corpses. In those first couple of days, though, I was half convinced that the Dunnstown Police Department was the victim of another hi-larious “skeletonizing” hoax.

  At any rate, it was clear that our letter writer knew his (or her) stuff when it came to these bodies. After my recent library visit with Kroth, I reviewed my notes and the most recent missive from our serial letter writer and compared. “Hands and feet altered in a mockery of natural ones, appendaged like sea creatures or insects.” Appendaged? Not a term I’d ever heard... except from the stuttering mouth of a certain librarian. Yeah, I’d be having more words with Mr. Solomon Kroth. But first things first.

  “Guidry,” I said. “We’re headed back to Treasure Forest tomorrow morning.”

  “Sure thing, boss.”

  My partner seemed as carefree and jovial about taking on this bizarre, gruesome case as he ever did about anything. Nothing much got to friend Guidry—till the day we investigated the factory.

  - 4 -

  I realized early the night before we went out to the park that I couldn’t smoke a cigarette without coughing till I almost puked. Later learned that pretty much all Dunnstown smokers quit temporarily that evening. Cigarettes of any brand suddenly tasted like rotten plums.

  The next day, even foggier and more putrid than the last, Guidry and I headed out to the abandoned mill.

  There’s something so ill conceived about Municipal Park. It’s not that it isn’t well maintained. Most of it is. But the park kind of goes on and on, you know? It’s merged with that part of town in a way, and I’m still not clear where the park ends and where the rest of the city begins. It doesn’t help that Dunnstown is subject to these thick, putrid fogs that last day and night. But even when the sky is clear I can’t tell Municipal Park from the rest of the neighborhoods around it.

  Example: heading towards downtown, once you get beyond the big ditch-waterfall thing, past the dingy old train, the “I Dream of Jeannie” looking jet and the big, green, peeling archway entrance to the park, you realize you’re in a conventional green space and, simultaneously, in a suburb of the shitty, dilapidated, ranch-style house variety. And you wonder, “
Are these people living in the park or just on its borders?” Then you notice Bronco Billy’s—a crappy little bar that’s been there from time immemorial—kind of tucked between the rental boat place and a ravaged looking set of swings. Man, how is that even legal? Just a quick turn around the corner and you’re in the park proper, with the city museum on your right and all the ducks and geese again behind it. But then just a bit up the road across the street there’s an old Naval recruiting station. Has this huge parking lot that I’ve never seen more than a couple of cars parked in. And up the hill from that—more of the ranch-style, single story monstrosities. Followed by Treasure Forest.

  Have you actually been out to Treasure Forest? Dunnstown Botanical Gardens sits somewhere in there along with what’s left of the paper mill. It’s a pretty wooded area. But have you noticed how the underbrush is kind of wasting away? The vines and the branches all yellowed? Those ugly, skinny, pine straw-making machines are all scorched about a foot or two above their roots. On paper mill days or clear ones, a kind of smoke or smog clings to the ground, just as Kroth mentioned. Sometimes gives the impression that you’re walking on top of a greasy thunderhead or a steaming, scummy pond.

  Guidry and I stopped and made the short hike through Treasure Forest, up a steep hill, and there in a clearing stood the old mill. It’s not a pretty building, and I can’t imagine it ever was. Dark green. Shit green. I think it’s rectangular, but it’s hard to say from the limited visibility.

  The first time we visited the factory, Guidry and I explored the grounds as well as we could in the crap fog. It’s like you’re out in the country but without the birds singing and squirrels and shit. None of that. Almost underwater quiet. Kroth had been right about the air quality—it stinks in general but especially around the mill. Little black or gray bits of what Guidry called ash floated in the brownish murk. Whatever it was in the air set my asthma right off. Two albuterol puffs. Three. Guidry didn’t seem to notice or much care. He could’ve been on vacation.