Supernatural Noir

——

Firstly, he must have wanted to own her. Why else would he have found a way to keep her all this time?

As for what she wanted, what she dreamed as she rode (or ran) on the carousel that trapped her—to be seen, to be loved, to be free—as for what she wanted, no one ever asked her at all.

——

Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, and very nearly named after Peregrin Took. She is a recipient of the John W. Campbell, Sturgeon, Locus, and Hugo Awards. She has been nominated multiple times for the British Science Fiction Association Awards, and is a Philip K. Dick Award nominee. She currently lives in southern New England with a famous cat. Her hobbies include murdering inoffensive potted plants, ruining di

Her most recent books are a space opera, Chill, from Bantam Spectra, and a fantasy, By the Mountain Bound, from Tor.

| DEAD SISTER |

Joe R. Lansdale

—

I had my office window open, and the October wind was making my hair ruffle. I was turned sideways and had my feet up, cooling my heels on the edge of my desk, noticing my socks. Once the pattern on the socks had been clocks; now the designs were so thin and colorless, I could damn near see my ankles through them.

I was looking out the window, watching the town square from where I sat, three floors up, which was as high as anything went in Mud Creek. It seemed pretty busy down there for a town of only eight thousand. Even a couple of dogs were looking industrious, as if they were in a hurry to get somewhere and do something important. Chase a cat, bite a mailman, or bury a bone.

Me, I wasn’t working right then, and hadn’t in a while. For me, 1958 had not been a ba

I was about to get a bottle of cheap whiskey out of my desk drawer, when there was a knock on the door. I could see my name spelled backward on the pebbled glass, and beyond that a shadow that had a nice overall shape.

I said, “Come on in, the water’s fine.”

A blond woman wearing a little blue pill hat came in. She was the kind of dame if she walked real fast, she might set the walls on fire. She sat down in the client chair and crossed her legs and let her cool blue dress slide up so I could see her knees. She was wearing stockings so sheer, she might as well have not had any on. She lifted her head and stared at me with eyes that would make a monk set fire to his bible.

She was carrying a cute little purse that might hold a compact, a couple of quarters, and a pencil. She let it rest on her lap, laid her hand on it like it was a pet cat.

“Mr. Taylor? I was wondering if you could check on something for me?” she said.

“If it’s on your person, no charge.”

She smiled at me. “I heard you thought you were fu

“Not really, but I try the stuff out anyway. See how this one works for you. I get fifty a day plus expenses.”

“You might have to do some rough stuff.”

“How rough?” I said.

“I don’t know. I really don’t know what’s going on at all, but I think it may be someone who’s not quite right.”

“Did you talk to the police?” I asked.

She nodded. “They checked, watched for three nights. But nobody showed. Soon as they quit, it started over again.”

“Where did they watch, and what did they watch?”

“The graveyard. They were watching a grave. I could swear someone was digging it up at night.”

“You saw this?”

“If I saw it, I’d be sure, wouldn’t I?”

“You got me there,” I said.

“My sister, Susan. She died of something unexpected. Eighteen. Beautiful. One morning she’s feeling ill, and then the night comes, and she’s feeling worse, and the next day she’s dead. Just like that. She was buried in the Sweet Pine Cemetery, and I go each morning on my way to work to bring flowers to her grave. The ground never settled. I got the impression it was being worked over at night. That someone was digging there. That they were digging up my sister, or trying to.”

“That’s an odd thing to think.”

“The dirt was always disturbed,” she said. “The flowers from the day before were buried under the dirt. It didn’t seem right.”

“So, you want me to check the place out, see if that’s what’s going on?”

“The police were so noisy and so obvious I doubt they got a true view of things. No one would try with them there. They thought I was crazy. What I need is someone who can be discreet. I would go myself, but I might need someone with some muscle.”

“Yeah, you’re too nice a piece of chicken to be wandering a graveyard. It would be asking for trouble. Your sister’s name is Susan. What’s yours?”

“Oh, I didn’t tell you, did I? It’s Cathy. Cathy Carter. Can you start right away?”

“Soon as the money hits my palm.”

——

I probably didn’t need a .38 revolver to handle a grave robber, but you never know. So I brought it with me.

My plan was if there was someone actually there, to put the gun on him and make him lie down, tie him up, and haul him to the police. If he was digging up somebody’s sister, the country cops downtown might not let him make it to trial. He might end up with a warning shot in the back of the head. That happened, I could probably get over it.

Course, it could be more than one. That’s why the .38.

My take, though, was it was all hooey. Not that Cathy Carter didn’t believe it. She did. But my guess was the whole business was nothing more than her grieving imagination, or a dog or an armadillo digging around at night.

I decided to go out there and look at the place during the day. See if I thought there was any kind of monkey business going on.

Sweet Pines isn’t a pauper graveyard on the whole, but a lot of paupers are buried there, on the low back end near Coats Creek—actually on the other side of the graveyard fence. Even in death, they couldn’t get inside with the regular people. Outsiders to the end.

There’ve been graves there since the Civil War. A recent flood washed away a lot of headstones and broke the ground open and pushed some rotten bones and broken coffins around. It was all covered up in a heap with a dozer after that: sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, grandmas and grandpas, massed together in one big ditch for their final rest.

The fresher graves on the higher ground, inside the cemetery fence, were fine. That’s where Susan was buried.

I parked at the gate, which was a black ornamental thing with fence tops like spearheads. The fence was six feet high and went all around the cemetery. The front was a large, open area with a horseshoe sign over it that read in metal curlicues Sweet Pine Cemetery.

That was just in case you thought the headstones were for show.

Inside, I went where Cathy told me Susan was buried and found her grave easy enough. There was a stone marker with her name on it, and the dates of birth and death. The ground did look fresh dug. I bent down and looked close. There were scratches in the dirt, but they didn’t look like shovel work. There were a bunch of cigarette butts heel mashed into the ground near the grave.

I went over to a huge shade tree nearby and leaned on it, pulled out a stick of gum and chewed. It was comfortable under the tree, with the day being cool to begin with and the shadow of the limbs lying on the ground like spilled night. I chewed the gum and looked at the grave for a long time. I looked around and decided if there was anything to what Cathy had said, then the cops wouldn’t have seen it, or rather they would have discouraged any kind of grave-bothering soul from entering the cemetery in the first place. Those cigarette butts were the tip-off. My guess was they belonged to the cops, and they had stood not six feet from the grave, smoking, watching. Probably, like me, figuring it was all a pipe dream. Only thing was, I pla