It must have been sometime past midnight. I could tell because the moon and the street lamp always cast a certain shadow through the blinds around that time, a blue hue that purified the silence. I looked for clues like this to guide me past the level of “just a hunch,” while I’m on the beat. Telling time by the moon and the shadows is a certain asset known to some who have become permanent residents of the night shifts. On this early morning Sunday, the blue hue…became especially telling. That’s when the body came in.
The smell preceded it by at least 30 seconds. It was fresh, the smell was. When you have been a private detective…married to the County Coroner for as long as I have, you get to know the many varieties of “Death’s Aromas,” pretty good. My life partner, she’s the Coroner. Me…well, I’m the starving Investigative artist, in private contract form nowadays. I tend to hang out with her when she does the 3 month night shift rotation. I get to steal away some time with her, and get to be the first to see some of the bodies that are hauled in here, by the friendly Homicide guys and gals. I thought my P.I. business was rough…wouldn’t trade it, no Sir…no thanks. I don’t mind the crime scenes; it’s the taking orders and following procedures that I seem to be presenting in an uncompromising manner with. Nonetheless, I still have the first whiff of any case that rolls itself in here, and that is just one of the aforementioned advantages to my girls’ night shift.
On this particular night, there was something other than “Death’s Aroma,” that rode in on the breeze. I do believe it has heightened every hue, and cast a strange sense upon the shadows. It was almost like…they were cowering…away. I also noticed there seemed to be an extreme sense of urgency in the delivery guys’ moves to drop this body off and leave quickly. They were choking from the smell behind their masks; I thought for sure one of them was going to lose their last meal. The squeaky wheels of the gurney came to a halt. One of them shoved a clipboard at my girl to sign, and barely waited for her to finish before snatching it back up, They were gone faster than we could roll our eyes at them. “That was strange…” she said. “Indeed it was…don’t they usually try to hang out for a while and at least poke fun at the dead people’s hair. I’ve never seen those two before; new guys are always squeamish…” I shrugged, gave her a grin and we both snickered at them. “Usually they at least warn me when they’re sending in a couple of rookies. You never know when you’ll get a weirdo trying to get in here to drool over the carnage. Besides, I could have rolled out a couple of fresh autopsies for the occasion. I love doing that to the newbie’s.” She gave that evil little grin. I love when she makes me laugh at the morbid stuff like that. She snapped on the rubber gloves, and we both held our breath a bit to have a closer look. The smell was so overwhelming…I thought I’d pass out.
Just as I stepped forward, I heard a few loud crackles followed by a disturbing flicker of the blue hue through the blinds. I heard my girl gasp; only slightly startled. One final zap from outside, then suddenly everything went pitch dark…and quiet. I reached quickly…ok, fumbled in a slight panic…to my pocket, pulled out my zippo and flicked desperately, yet calmly until we had fire. Right away, I could see she wanted to chuckle at me for the ‘oh so gallant, yet clumsy’ scramble to step up in the lights out situation. I gave her that look, like…yeah, I know…but still you married me. She reached in her lab coat pocket and pulled out her mini-maglite, had it on in like one swift move. “Show off…” I mumbled to her now smirking face.
We managed to find a couple of candles, left over from a midnight romantic dinner on a night where there were no dead folks a rollin’ in. “Hey, why not use that handy little flashlight to light the candles…oh, wait…I guess now you’ll need this…hhhmmmm?” I said, smirking back at her and waving my zippo in a taunting manner of course. “You know…” she replies “…if there weren’t work to do right now, that cuteness of yours just might have gotten you laid…just saying.” I gave her a low sexy growl at the nape of her neck…and we broke apart quickly, knowing it just ain’t right to have living sex in front of the dead. We decided a long time ago that we would hate it if it happened to us when we reached this point of life, or…uh…death. Then she says “Ssshhhh…did you hear that?”
Her eyes went to a peculiar position, then rested upon the body in front of us. One of her eyebrows began to rise into a position that I was not yet familiar with. She stopped breathing, stepped back about two feet and said “Still…still alive…I think she’s still…alive”. In a somewhat slow motion movement, I followed her eyes in the direction of the body. Then, along with the sudden realization that she appeared to be correct…the sounds she was hearing began echoing throughout the room surrounding both of us. It was almost like when you held your ear up close to a giant sea shell, and you could hear the faint sounds of waves crashing upon the shore and cliff sides…only there seemed to be distress reaching out through the echoes. My eyes were as transfixed to the body, as my ears were to the sounds. I swear, I could hear voices…distorted and distant, but they were there. Much to my astonishment, there was indeed life in this room besides that of the presumed, that of me and my girl. I didn’t move a muscle…as I gazed upon the charcoaled body that seemed to lay so still, and yet…I could hear the breathing; it was so dark and shallow.
For some odd reason, I reached out to touch the body. Just before my fingers could reach the surface of the chest, a noise in the corner of the room caused both of us to shatter our trance and jolt our heads in that direction. “What the hell was that…?” I asked.
Before she could answer me with an “Idon’t know,” there was a huge flash of blue, and what appeared to be…fog, rolling from the corner and into the room. Instinct set in as I placed my arm out towards my girl, and motioned for her to step back behind me a bit. Still, neither of us blinked or uttered a word; slightly petrified as we watched the fog fill up the room. We seemed to be fixated on the blue hues that were mostly solid now, with the occasional flicker and zap. A wicked wind howled through, blowing…sand, for hells sakes…all over the floor of the lab.
Then all of the sudden, I heard the sound of seagulls, distant but distinct…then a shadow began to form through the blue. There were wings first, just the shadows of them though…then those wings disappeared, giving way to the full form of something…someone. It was a woman! She was short and really, really old…creeping through the blue, towards us! A tattered and soiled black veil traced behind the short woman, who walked slowly and hunched with a curiosity that was surely meant to freeze all those who stood upon the sand that had howled in on the wind with her.
My head was pounding…with her presence. Like marching…it sounded like…marching. This marching in my head…couldn’t have been that of the Saints. It had to have been that of the wayward, servants of a Demon whose brains were washed upon her shores with tales of wicked sand and promising sounds emerging from the evil seagulls. Sometimes my imagination distracted me, but this…was not my imagination.
She floated closer until it was just the three of us, as she began hovering above this char-coaled body. She looked up at us; her eyes gave off a deep cobalt blue glow. Her head moved slightly to the right, inquisitive like…then her hand came up, pointing a long crooked finger that looked…well, as black as ashes…at us and said “Do…not…look into the eyes of this one,” her shaky old voice reverberated off the walls “she was not meant to be the task of the Coven…” The Coven, I thought…? What does she mean…the task of’…? She continued, though it’s not like we were about to interrupt her at this point. “Poor, poor girl…” a black drip of something just left the corner of this old woman’s eye “There is an order, and that order must be followed.
A beach party, she was told. Poor, poor girl…she thought she was going to a party. Her innocence…was shattered long ago; she was no good to me this way…why they Chant to me words of no meaning…how dare they Chant in my name…” The old woman reached down and stroked the few strands of singed hair that were left upon this young girl’s charcoaled body. I felt my girl reach slyly behind me and squeeze my hand so hard I thought it would fall off. I squeezed it back, mostly to let her know that I too, was seeing and hearing the same things she was. A cry let out of this old woman, a shriek that deafened my mind with the same pain she released with this sound of fury. Still, the light…the blue hue was flickering with a wicked vengeance from the corner. She looked at us again, pointing that old creepy finger and said “Do not look into her eyes. She is a wrongful sacrifice, my dearest living friends…and she was lit a fire in the name of Purity…for my taking.” She looked down, as if in pain “She was not pure…she was not…pure. She was taken already, long ago. She was taken…too young, by a wayward group unlike her…by foes of the oceans, by Friends of the Fire…” Her shriek pierced the room, and at the very mention of…she pointed to the ceiling, we looked up and caught a glimpse of her visions…of how this body between the three of us ended up here on this early Sunday morning.
I saw a group of people gathering around a giant beach bonfire, chanting as they each touched the ends of their torches to the wood. There in the middle, tied and bound…was the woman…that now laid here dead, yet breathing. She cried out, this woman did…and no one listened. They just kept on chanting, their long robes dragging the sand behind them in a slow clockwise direction around the now well lit fire. I couldn’t tell you how long we had been staring into this vision. It was far to0 long for me, no matter how short.
The old woman broke the vision apart before our very eyes, then she said “When the burning of the flesh was exhausted, the Friends of the Fire entitled themselves to the soul of a false sacrifice…intending on delivering it to me in the name of The Oceans Purity…” her head flew back slowly as she let out a shriek, then a few shrills that would surely never leave my mind. My hand was fused to my girls’ hand now, even through the slippery sweat that started some time back. A sudden flutter caused me to blink, but just once…and out from behind this old creepy woman appeared two giant black wings. She rose a few feet, as if to get her glowing cobalt blue eyes closer to ours, and hovered in mid air.
”You people…” she said accusingly, her figure shifting with mild emotion “with your machines and technology of the living…keeping the Reapers alive…” she gave us a tsk-tsk look “don’t you know? You don’t know…do you?” She looked adoringly at us, then at the body “With one look into the eyes of this frailty, it is said a curse would linger dormant until just the right moment, when pain could inflict itself in the direction of those who struck the match…the match that burned her eyes, but not her soul…the match that was struck because this ritual called for purity, and she lacked of this purity from a very early age…only, they didn’t know. They have cast a heavy shadow upon the waters.”
The old woman’s cobalt blues went to a shade that was closer to…a set of black holes “She…can use your eyes. She can live inside of your souls, and lead you to those who showed her no mercy, who showed her…her demise. She would cast them out…through your eyes, for her soul…to a place…” her voice grew hollow and deeper. She looked as though she knew of this place she was describing, “Where snowflakes fall, but never land…they are afraid. Where the roses bloom, but never die…they disguise the thorns, but seize then…your eyes. Where the ivy creeps, but never ends…it simply strangles all with whom it surrounds…within…that place.”
I think I actually shuddered just then. What does this old woman want from us? Why does she loom over us in the blue and the fog, telling us of tales we surely should not be privy to? I started to speak, and let these questions roll off my now tied up tongue, but she let out one of those damned shrieks again, flapped those big black wings a couple of times…then continued .
“I have come here to release this soul from the duties that are not hers to bear the burden of…she is not pure, by no fault of her own soul…but by the fault of the wayward ones…that took it when she was just a child. She shall have solace in my Oceans from this day to eternity. There are others who shall take her place on this night.” She looked at my girl, and motioned a ghostly shadow stroke softly upon her cheek “Don’t you worry my pretty living one, they will not crowd your dwelling…these souls will be…all mine.” “You are a believer, yes…I can see that…but, your God…your God doesn’t live here.”
She motioned toward the blue light in the corner, now flickering stronger and louder than before, “this place is the Otherness; it is the place just beyond where the blue of the Ocean ends and the edge of the sky cannot reach…it is not for Him…or I…to choose who goes there, but He, your God…waits just outside for those who would take a mindful turn, and choose willingly to repent their chants and cheers for the fire to rise higher upon this poor, poor girls’ soul…and soon…He will have her soul too…for listen my Children when I tell you.”
She pointed that crooked finger at both of us, squinted her cobalt blues and continued. “I am the Oceans Daughter, and I shall oversee the delivery of this soul…in the name of purity, I shall deliver this soul.” The old woman allowed us a moment to soak it all in, then she looked at us and gave…an almost angelic gaze, cradled the charcoaled body into her arms, and began to recede into the blue and through the fog. In an electric moment, she had disappeared. All I could hear were the sounds of seagulls, waves…and the old woman’s giant black wings stroking through the fog.
True were the stories I had always read when I was young. Ominous and ever present were the forces that would stand against all evil to save the souls of the gullible and lonely.
The only part I was left confused about was…in the name of who and what?
Suddenly, a surge of blue came flickering through the blinds. The flickering…awoke me. My girl was talking to me; I couldn’t quite make out what she was saying. She was tapping lightly on my cheek, and rubbing my chest a little.
“Honey…? Are you awake? Are you all right…?” As I opened my eyes, I could see her smiling at me…there was a ceiling fan above her head. What the hell was I doing on the floor? I jumped up in a panic and looked frantically around the room. The old woman, the fog…the seagulls, were all gone. Hell, the body was gone too! Wait…wait just a second…was it all just a dream? “Where’s the body…the..the…body, it was right there all burnt up, and…and the old woman…are you all right?”
My eyes were all wide-eyed wild, shooting around the room and into the corners…and she looked at me like I had just lost my mind. Then she shook her head, gave me that smile and asked, “Have you been into the reefer again today…?” she rolled her eyes, threw me my keys and said “Take me home, Butch…I can’t believe you tripped and fell in the dark, you’re usually so good finding your way…through the dark.” she winked at me, kissed me on the cheek and rubbed me on the head, ruffling my hair all messy. I grumbled a little because I hate when she does that, but mostly because…I just couldn’t believe it was all… just a freaking dream.
We walked to her car through the parking lot, and it occurred to me “Hey…wait. Why are we going home so early, it can’t be the end of your shift yet…right?” I gave my best ‘perplexed’ look; apparently I was still in a fog…and she said “Oh…well, the power went out all over the city, so they re-routed those two new drivers to a Coroner just outside the city. We won’t be seeing those idiots again tonight…I can’t believe they actually lost a body…how one just loses a body is beyond me…”
Her words trailed off as my focus drifted up to the blue hue of the street lamp. “Hey, how come this light is still on? I thought you said the power was out…” She looked up at it, shrugged and said “I don’t know, it came on just before you woke up from you little nap…” she chuckled “…that was priceless by the way. Now, how about you just get in the car and we’ll talk about your suspicions of the big scary blue light when we get home.”
Now, she was just making fun of me. Finally, I gave out a big grin, and decided she was right.
We got in the car, I put the keys in and she reached over to tap on my watch. “That’s weird…” she said. “What…did it stop again?” I turned it over to look, and just as the street lamp flickered its blue over the glass…my stomach sank, and my mouth went dry.
She says “No…it works, but…” she paused “How did sand get in there…?”
