The Secret of Ventriloquism Read online

  “Damn,” I said, observing the petrified looking bushes and vines all around the mill. Nut job Kroth had been right about that too. While the flora looked like shit in Treasure Forest, here around the derelict factory it was brown and brittle with old death. Just as if the mill had poisoned the good goddamn earth all around it.

  The corroded metal door of the central building stood ajar, and somewhere unseen above us, I knew, hung the factory’s inert smokestack.

  The air quality was worse inside than it had been outside, filled with fog or smoke or some unpleasant combination of them all. There was, of course, no power in the building. We entered the rectangular, nondescript lobby, with its half exposed, stone walls and old, rotten boards. Visibility was nil.

  I shambled back to the cruiser, sneezing and hacking, to retrieve a couple of surgical-looking filter masks, a pair of protective goggles and two flashlights. Kroth’s warnings and our previous experience with the skeleton digs had prepped us to bring that sort of gear.

  “Nice,” Guidry said after we donned masks and goggles and switched on our flashlights. “You look like you just stepped right out of The Road Warrior!”

  “Shut it. If you’re right about the serial killer thing our man could be in there right now.”

  “Or our girl. Ooh! A lady artist serial killer.”

  “Ladies first.” With that I beckoned him to enter the mill ahead of me.

  Happy go lucky Guidry just giggled, his ample belly jiggling as it always did. Now you follow why I never fucked him?

  So we went through one of the two doors on either side of the mill lobby and the adjacent office that led into the mill proper. We explored several large rooms at length, all filled with equipment I recognized from my library research—the bottom part of a rusty old digester, dripping storage tanks, and tons of pipes running up and down and all around us.

  “Sweet Jesus, Guidry, look at all the junk floating in the air. Is this goddamn mill operational?”

  Because what looked like the ashes floating outside and inside the lobby were also floating around the mill house itself. An even denser whatever it was—at least in our flashlights’ beams.

  “No way, but that’s pretty weird stuff all right,” Guidry replied. “Y’know, it almost looks like one of those Christmas globes with gray or black instead of white snow floating around, don’t it?”

  “Well, that shit better not be asbestos drifting down from the ceiling and walls,” I replied, checking out a couple of small, single stall restrooms with matching toilets (complete with matching, petrified shit in the bowls). “Ugh. If I get asbestosis or something one day because of this, I’ll kill you, Guidry.”

  “But you know what this stuff really reminds me of, Raphie? Sea Monkeys.”

  “Sea Monkeys? Am I supposed to know what that means? This isn’t the setup for some stupid redneck joke, is it?”

  Guidry giggled. “Sea Monkeys. They were a real thing years back, though maybe a little before your time. Used to advertise in that old Boy Scout magazine, Boy’s Life.”

  “Jesus, I don’t want to hear about this, Guidry. Boy Scouts? Pfft. No way you were a Boy Scout. For Christ’s sake...”

  “Only made Cub Scout,” Guidry replied as he searched down row after row of giant paper spools. “Anywho, the advertisement had this family of undersea people with webbed hands, gills, the works. I think there were a little king and a queen and a couple of kids. Sea Monkeys in an aquarium inside a castle with this big ol’ kid’s face staring in at them.”

  “Wow. You’re old. With the maturity of a third grader.” I paused for a deep-throated, hacking cough. “You know what, bud, can you speed it up? I’d kind of like to finish with this before suppertime. Ack. Not that I’m likely to eat much.”

  “Sure, sure, Raphie. The point is I saved up my allowance when I was about ten and bought the thing. Came with a miniature, red plastic aquarium covered in these magnifying circles. Had packets full of, what, eggs? Fish food? Both? Fill up the things with water, pour the powder in, and in a few days—kaboom!—Sea Monkeys.”

  “So did they end up looking like a miniature royal family from the Black Lagoon?”

  “Well, no. In a few days, I saw little white specks squirming around the tank—maybe a dozen of em. I was let down at how they turned out. No hands or legs or cute little faces like in the ad. Later found out they were a type of miniature shrimp, but what the Sea Monkeys really looked like—well—the closest I can come to describing em is, uh, sperm.”

  “Oh, God, here we go. I spent all this time listening to your boring ass story only to be sexually harassed?”

  “Naw, naw,” Guidry replied, giggle-cackling and half-ass-inspecting the sidelights in what appeared to be a ruined storage room. “Really. They looked just like oversized sperm, kind of jerking around the little tank. They were just rubbery little things like you’d expect to see in some kind of state fair ride or something. I was into em for a day or two after that. Put em on the far side of my bed. I think some Sea Monkey food came with the kit, and, uh, I somehow forgot to feed them.”

  “Ugh. As soon as we get out of here I’m contacting PETA.”

  Guidry giggled. “My point is this—when I remembered to check on em about a week or so later, what was left of em was just floating around, suspended in the dirty water. Through the magnifying lenses I could see em though, and I couldn’t believe how skeletal they looked. Like I could see tiny ribs and other bones if I looked real close. I kept em for a long time—just... I couldn’t stop watching those little Sea Monkey bodies. Looked more like real little things dead than they ever did when they were alive.”

  “Ok, now you’re repulsing me, Guidry. Stop. I already feel like throwing up.”

  “And, anyway, this stuff in the air in here and outside for that matter, it reminds me of them Sea Monkey bodies. Just thought I’d share that,” he said, grinning through his mask, squinting and jiggling with laughter.

  “Thanks, doofus.” I said. “Go around to the left and I’ll hit the right side.”

  So we finished sweeping through the front half of the mill. I knew the small doors on either side of us just ahead could access the wood yard.

  I walked down near one of them when Guidry waved me over. He was near a small compartment I hadn’t noticed, fumbling with its handle.

  “What are you doing, dumbo?” I asked, “Don’t you think we should search the wood yard before you start dicking with electrical boxes?”

  “This ain’t an electrical box, Raphie,” Guidry replied. He opened the metal panel, which gave a rusty-hinged shriek, revealing a long enclosed compartment. It housed a ladder, blackened with grime.

  “Jesus, smells like the paper mill shit itself and died up there.” I said, gagging.

  “Mmmm. Smells like money to me,” Guidry replied, giggling.

  “Crummy. Ladies first,” I said with a bow, as he entered in front of me.

  After that, it was clink, clink, clink up into the darkness, the flashlight beams filled with Guidry’s Sea Monkey skeletons in my imagination. We entered an open balcony area overlooking the pulp mill below us, not that we could see much thanks to the bad lighting and all the goddamn ashes in the air. Along the front wall I saw some large, blacked out windows over a series of huge standing closets. A hardware shop. On the far side of the balcony space, a door led to a cube-shaped control booth (with ancient wiring and rusted crank-like levers still intact).

  Then I heard a clicking noise behind me and turned around, squatting like one of Charlie’s Angels with my gun out.

  “Over there,” Guidry whispered. “I thought I saw a face for a second.”

  Another echoing click in the smoky darkness. And then another.

  “What’s that? A pipe?” I whispered.

  “No way. There ain’t been a working pipe here for at least thirty years. Wait here.”

  “Fuck that. I’m coming with you.”

  He turned back towards me then with his masked face and hi
s index finger held up over where his mouth would be. His belly quivered in a soundless giggle. Of course he was enjoying this. I gave him my own finger in turn and followed him into a kind of grid of metal and plywood running over the pulp mill below—a makeshift way to get at the pipes that crisscrossed in every direction.

  The thin flooring creaked and the ceiling hung low—no more than three feet above us. I banged my head with a curse more than once on the overhanging piping which swept in front of us now and again. Every five feet or so, there appeared a triangular opening where another series of black pipes hung over the pulp mill below. The clicking continued getting louder and louder, but I couldn’t pick up any pattern to it. Just a hollow kind of tap. Pause. Tap. Pause pause. Tap.

  I saw the body out of the corner of my eye before Guidry did —child-size, hung halfway over one of the gaps in the grid, close to falling down to the mill house floor. Without a second thought, I lunged for it, promptly whacking my head on one of those invisible pipes in the process, this time hard enough to make me see stars. I staggered backwards and landed on my ass. Guidry ambled by me, and by the time I recovered he was holding—cradled like a baby—a small skeleton.

  “What the fuck, Guidry? What the fuck?”

  Guidry just stared at me through his goggles. I turned my flashlight beam—wavy with those black, floating motes—onto the body. Something like the skeletons we had dug up recently. But far more hideous than any of them. It appeared to be fresher. The remains of the thing’s yellowed, shriveled skin cracked across its face like desiccated sand. Its mouth hung open to reveal a single line of small, dark teeth. The hair was black and slick, almost as if painted high on its head, giving the illusion of premature balding. Below the neck the child-thing seemed more insect than human. Too many arms, or were they legs? Whatever the case, they were far too long and jointed. I had no idea how Guidry could bring himself to touch the thing, let alone cuddle up to it. But worst of all, the thing’s eyes—its great, round googly eyes. I’ve never seen eyes like that on a human being. The eyes of a doll, of a shark—still intact in its head.

  “My god, Raph. Just a kid.”

  “Not sure that was a kid, Guidry. Just put it down.”

  “They told us this wouldn’t happen.”

  As if in response, the thing’s mouth shut with a loud click. I let out a bark, and my partner threw the body down.

  A nasty crack rang out as the child-thing smacked one of the pipes, followed by a more distant shattering noise about thirty feet below. Guidry stumbled forward, though I managed to break his fall, preventing him from slumping over into the triangular wedge of darkness.

  We breathed hard and coughed and sweated, tangled up together for a while, and then I managed to heave Guidry to his feet.

  “What did you say a minute ago?” I asked. “‘They’ said what?”

  Guidry didn’t respond. His balding head shone with sweat. He stripped off both goggles and mask.

  “Oh God, Raphie, I think I broke him.” He turned and waddled out of the pipe grid, coughing.

  “Broke what? That kid-thing? Was that even human? The fuck, Guidry?”

  But he didn’t respond, staggering into the control room and back towards the ladder. I followed, clutching my still tender head.

  “Where the hell are you going, Guidry?”

  “I got to make sure he ain’t broken.”

  “Are you out of your goddamn mind? That thing’s way past breaking.” I caught up with Guidry and turned him around, grasping him by his meaty shoulders. “Look, it’s almost five thirty, and that whatever it is isn’t going anywhere. Anyway, we’ll need backup before we come back.”

  Pale and shivering, he let me lead him down the ladder and drag him out of the factory, down the hill to the twilit grove below it and into the passenger side of the cruiser. I drove maybe a half a mile down the winding road past the Naval Recruiting station when I had to stop for Guidry to puke. Then I puked, too. We had that black and gray gunk all over us from head to foot, though Guidry had gotten by far the worst of it. He had breathed in all that shit sans mask and couldn’t stop coughing for a long while after upchucking.

  Later, on the way out of Municipal Park, I started in on Guidry.

  “So, you care to explain what you said back there?” I asked, making sure to take my turns extra slow, both for our stomachs’ sakes and because the visibility outside was so poor.

  “What?”

  “What you told me up there—‘they said it wouldn’t happen.’ Who?”

  Guidry just stared in the pseudo-darkness of the cruiser.

  “The fuck, Guidry? Who is ‘they?’”

  Guidry’s mouth dropped open, and he glared at me as if I had just asked him if Jesus liked to do it doggy-style.

  “You goddamned Dunnstowners,” I said, forcing a laugh.

  “No, Raph. No. This isn’t funny. You weren’t there after the 389 crashed. You didn’t see what happened.”

  “Didn’t see what? What kind of shit are you mixed up in, Mike?” I had never seen him so worked up (or, come to think of it, worked up at all... about anything).

  After dropping off Guidry without another word, I popped the cruiser’s trunk. Then I pulled out the illustration I had thrown in there the day before—next to the “20 Simple Steps to Ventriloquism” manual. I looked at the Tree of Life and False-Life illustration that Kroth had passed off to me. Flipping the sheet over, I saw a street address scrawled there followed by “drop by when you want to know more” scrawled in spidery letters underneath it. I grabbed the little book too, slammed the trunk and got back into the cruiser. By that point, after being clear of the fucking paper mill air-gunk for a while, my appetite had improved. Looked like Mr. Kroth and I were going to have that dinner date after all.

  - 5 -

  The “date” didn’t happen that evening, though. Fact is, I got lost on my way there thanks to the greasy, gagging fishbowl fog. Ended up sitting in the cruiser on the side of some half-suburb, half-park street all night long, waiting for dawn. In the car’s dome light, though, I caught up on my reading. The only thing on hand was Kroth’s ventriloquist manual. One of the steps in the book involved “bringing a plane down” through something the ostensible author, Joseph Snavely, called “Greater Ventriloquism.” I was shaken up. I kept thinking about Guidry’s mention of the plane crash (Flight 389) in connection with something he saw. Something to do with the Factory and maybe the kid-thing too. I slept like shit that night, as you might expect. Dreamt about hybrid spider/ventriloquist dummies, heads twisted backwards, facing up, skidding on top of a kind of lazy river inside a huge greenhouse.

  I woke in the semidarkness of morning. Couldn’t bring myself to eat a thing, let alone yesterday’s half eaten bagel bagged up on the cruiser’s floorboard. I had struggled with my asthma all night, waking up over and over again in the back seat with a start, wracked with coughing fits and worse. I’m sure I sucked in far more inhaled steroids into my body that night than was medically safe, but at least I was more or less alive.

  Meanwhile, my cop radio was full of business. Many of the townsfolk had developed the same symptoms I had experienced overnight—abdominal pain, nausea and vomiting, splitting headache, choking and shortness of breath, even coughing up blood. By that morning the local clinic had a long line of residents, all in positions of wrack or uneasy repose. Twenty-two people, nineteen of them asthmatics like me, died in the night. The DFD and the DPD were busy scrounging up oxygen tanks for the smog victims. I determined that as soon as I made it to Kroth’s house I was also going to take a long draw from whatever oxygen tank he no doubt had squirreled away there.

  I figured Kroth would be at home. The fog by that point was so thick that only idiots like me were attempting to drive.

  Kroth lived not far from Municipal Park and the university on the far west, semi-rural side of town. Even in the meager light of mid-morning, it took me a couple of hours in that fucking fog, and I still had a couple of minor fende
r benders along the way. Once at a railway crossing, the cruiser was nearly broadsided by a muted locomotive engine puffing down the tracks. I slammed on the brakes just in time. The train wound its way through the fog-diseased park neighborhood—appearing and disappearing like a ghost of itself. It looked to be an old engine, almost a twin of the rusted one displayed near the park’s entrance, its smokestack belching dark billowy fumes. But its smoke didn’t rise. It just oozed over the lip of the stack like black ink and collected pond-like on the ground around the cruiser.

  Kroth’s neighborhood contained the same nauseating houses found all around the park. His was also ranch-style, of course—a red brick jobbie with moldy, yellow siding, but otherwise indistinguishable from the others on his street. I strapped on my Glock, walked to the front door and banged its ornate, cheap looking knocker.

  “Who is it?” asked a husky voice that sounded nothing like the librarian I had met just a couple days back. Was this Kroth’s lover?

  “Detective Tosto, Dunnstown Police,” I said in husky response and immediately fell into a coughing fit before croaking, “Is this the residence of Solomon Kroth?”

  The porch light turned on, and I heard the deadbolt unlock and the chain rattle. The door opened, and there was Kroth standing before me—or someone like him. The styled, ample gray hair appeared disheveled and damp—the dapper, tweed-jacketed librarian of yesterday now wore a dingy gray wife beater and a pair of blown out jeans that left both of his angular knees poking out. Kroth’s feet were bare, and his skin was a light shade of blue.

  “Detective Tosto. Stay right there.”

  After about thirty seconds he returned to the porch holding a pair of tweezers and what appeared to be a test tube.

  “What the fuck?” I asked.

  “Language, detective.”

  Kroth plucked something gray from the right side of my head with the tweezers and dropped it into the tube.