Supernatural Noir

In Wormtown, it was different. I had Mike and Henry. I kept busy and didn’t have time to think about how fucked up it all was. I miss Mike. Really miss him already, like he’s been gone for years instead of minutes.

Now that I’m here, I’m afraid of the house. Like if I stare at the porch too long, I might see Grandma there, sitting in a chair, looking out over the lake, seeing whatever it was she saw, and smoking those Lucky Strikes. And what if now, right now, she finally turns to look at me, to see me?

I spin the car around, and park it so I’m facing the lake instead of the house. It doesn’t help. I feel the house and Grandma somewhere behind me.

Not sure if I’ll get reception out here, but I take my cell out and call Joe. It goes through. He picks up, says, “Hey.”

“Hey.”

We don’t say anything else. We sit and stew in the quiet. It feels, I don’t know, thick. Like it always has. I’m thinking Joe maybe feels it too. What’d Mike say? Being around me and Joe was uncomfortable. Sounds about right.

He says, “What do you want now, Da

“Joe,” I say. “Hey, Joe. I got something to tell you. It’s important.”

I pause and imagine what Henry, Greg, and Mike felt after they were shot, and before they disappeared. “Hey, Joe,” I say again. “Listen carefully. I’m up in Vermont, at the old place.”

I roll down my window. Goddamn, it’s cold out. Like I said earlier, didn’t wear the right clothes for this. Just a brown fla

Winter is coming early.

“What?”

“Yeah. I’m here, by myself, Joe. The place looks fucking terrible. Rotting away to nothing.”

“What are you doing up there?”

“I don’t know. Trying to get away, I guess. Can’t, though. Doesn’t matter. I’m here, and I decided to call you. Because I’m thinking I should’ve told you something a long time ago. You listening? Here it is: Fuck you, Joe.”

I drop the phone. It disappears somewhere below me. The black gloves I’m still wearing don’t keep my hands warm. I rub my hands together, and I slouch into the seat. I’m not feeling good at all. Things getting heavy. Lake getting blurry.

The shotgun is on the seat next to me. I might pick it up, and then fade away.

——

Paul G. Tremblay is the author of the novels The Little Sleep and No Sleep till Wonderland, both of which feature narcoleptic private detective Mark Genevich; the short speculative-fiction collections In the Mean Time and Compositions for the Young and Old; and the novellas City Pier: Above and Below and The Harlequin and the Train. His stories have appeared in Weird Tales, The Last Pentacle of the Sun: Writings in Support of the West Memphis Three, and Best American Fantasy 3. He served as fiction editor of ChiZine and as coeditor of Fantasy Magazine. He is also the coeditor of the Fantasy, Bandersnatch, and Phantom anthologies with Sean Wallace, and of Creatures! with John Langan. Paul is currently an advisor for the Shirley Jackson Awards. He still has no uvula, but plugs along, somehow. More information can be found at PaulTremblay.net and TheLittleSleep.com.

| MORTAL BAIT |

Richard Bowes

—

When I think of death, what comes to mind is the feel of an ice-cold knife racing up my leg like I’m a letter being sliced open. When that happens in my nightmares I wake up. In real life, just before the blade of ice reached my heart, the medic got to me where I lay in that bloody field at Aisne-Marne, tied and tightened a tourniquet above my left knee and stopped the flow before all my blood ran onto the grass.

——

That memory of my war came out of nowhere as I sat in my little office in Greenwich Village on a su

My name’s Sam Grant and I’m a private investigator. Logic and deduction come into my line of work. So do memory and intuition. My grandmother always said a sudden shiver meant someone had just stepped on the spot where your grave would be.

I could have told myself it was that or a stray draft of cold air. But I’d felt this before and knew what it meant. Some elf or fairy had shuffled my memories like a card deck. And that wasn’t supposed to happen to me.

At that moment I was writing a letter to my contact, Bertrade le Claire. It was Bertrade who had worked a magic to shield me.

An intruder would see her image, her long dark hair, beautiful wide eyes—a face that seemed like something off a movie screen. She wore a jacket of red and gold and a look that said, “Step back!” She was a law officer in the Kingdom beneath the Hill.

The letter I was writing concerned new clients, the Beyers, a couple from Menlo Park, New Jersey. He worked for an insurance company; she taught Sunday school. In my office, she talked, he studied the photos I keep on my wall, and they both clung to hope and the arms of their chairs.

They were the parents of Hilda, a junior at Rutgers and currently a missing person. Hilda, who, according to her mother, was a sensitive girl who wrote poetry, was due to graduate in June of 1952 and become an English teacher. She’d had a few boyfriends over the years, but nothing serious as far as anyone knew. Not the kind of young lady to run off on a whim. But four months back, it seemed that she had.

While his wife talked, Mr. Beyer looked at the signed photo of Mayor La Guardia with His Honor mugging for the camera as he shook my hand and thanked me for civilian services to New York City during the Second War to End All Wars.

The one where I’m getting kissed by Marshal Foch, I leave in the drawer, because some guys in this neighborhood might get the wrong idea.

But I display Douglas MacArthur, executive officer of the Rainbow Division in 1918, pi

Mrs. Beyer told me how the New Jersey cops couldn’t find a lead on Hilda. After other private eyes struck out, my name came up.

Mrs. Beyer paused, then said, “We have heard that she could have gone to another . . . ,” and trailed off.

“. . . realm,” I offered and she nodded. “It’s possible,” I said. Mr. Beyer’s eyes widened at hearing a man who’d been decorated by MacArthur say he believed in fairies.

After that we closed the deal quickly. My initial fee is $250. It’s stiff, but I think I’m worth it, especially since I wore my good suit and a fresh starched shirt for the occasion. I didn’t promise them their daughter back. I did promise I’d do everything I could to find her. On their way out, I shook hands with him. Put my left hand on hers for reassurance.

Playing baseball as a kid, I was a switch hitter, and I could field and throw with both my right and my left. I even learned to write with either hand. These days, the left’s the only thing about me that still works the way everything once did. And I tend to save it for special occasions.