Magic Dirt: The Best of Sean Williams (39 page)

“On the table ... Hell, I don’t know how to describe it. I thought it was a body, at first. It made me jump, it looked so real. Gave what’s-her-name, Cloe, a fright too. Old Jellyhead’s got himself some kind of dress-maker’s dummy down there, Senior Constable, but he’s not making dresses.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, it’s lying flat on its back, on the table. Splayed out, you know? It’s not that big, but he’s tried to make it look more ... real, I guess, and that makes it seem larger. He’s stuck a wig on it, and painted it, put clothes on it—all that. It has a face.”

“Whose face?”

“I don’t know. No-one I recognized. Should I have?”

“No.”
Not Cloe Flavell, then,
he thought to himself. “Is that it?”

“Yes.” She hesitated, then added: “To be honest, it gave me the creeps, that thing. It was just lying there, but I couldn’t take my eyes off it. I didn’t want to turn my back on it, either. Its mouth was open, and it looked ... I don’t know. I think that was where the smell was coming from.”

He thanked her when she had finished, and hung up.
A dressmaker’s dummy ... a wig ... clothes ... ?

Moir had described the contents of the old man’s bag—the bits and pieces, the everyday discards—as items a satanic chef might put on a shopping list. Hollister didn’t for a second think she’d meant it literally, but it had a ring of
something
to it. If it wasn’t the truth, then maybe it was a step in the right direction.

He booted up his computer for the first time in weeks and logged onto the Internet. What he found didn’t help him very much, but neither did it put his nagging suspicions to rest. When he searched on “voodoo dolls” he found numerous sites on black magic, Wicca and Satanism. Human tissue could be used to make any number of things: potions, imitative charms, curses, and—yes—voodoo dolls. Most were concerned with stealing part of someone else, or creating something from nothing that could become the spell-caster’s possession. A stream of half-familiar words scrolled down the screen.
Golem ... homunculus ... zombie...
But none of them sounded quite right. None of them fit.

The old man’s bag had contained samples of blood, dead skin, hair, fingernails and human waste from many different people, not just one. It was indeed discarded material, as Jellyhead himself had said, not fresh, not specifically stolen. And the fact that he had one sample from Cloe Flavell didn’t necessarily mean anything sinister, unless he was making lots of voodoo dolls, one for each sample of hair. And even if he was, there was still the question of
why.
Flavell was patently not under the old man’s control, so there wasn’t any efficacy to such a charm—not that Hollister had expected there to be. The alternative, though, was that Jellyhead was even crazier than he sounded, and that didn’t feel right either. Yet Hollister couldn’t help the feeling that he was getting somewhere.

“She won’t have any choice, now,” the old man had said.

What process had they inadvertently interrupted?

He rang the station a third time, and this time asked for Jane Moir.

“I’m worried,” he said.

“About what?”

“About Jellyhead.”

“Him? He’ll be okay. Our young friend will see to that.”

“No, I’m worried he might do something. I think you were right.”

He could practically hear Moir’s mind working on the other end of the line. “What’s going on, Wey? Is everything okay?”

“Everything’s fine, Jane. I’ve just thought about it some more, that’s all.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“There’s more to this. I know you, Wey. You don’t just turn like this. There’s something you’re not telling me.”

It was his turn to think carefully. In the end, he decided to be honest. She would know if he was lying, anyway.

“It’s Arna.”

“
Arna
? What about Arna?”

“She’s been telling me things, at night. No, wait, let me finish. I’m not going mad. It’s really happening. I hear her. She ...” He stopped. It did sound much crazier than he had thought when it was just him hearing her speak, alone, at night.

Moir said: “I think you’re taking this whole Jellyhead thing a little too seriously. And I thought
I
was! Just forget about it. It’ll go away. The dreams will stop—”

“They’re not dreams, Jane.”

“Whatever they are, then. Just let it go. You know it’s for the best.”

“Are you talking about Arna or Jellyhead?”

“Both, and you know that, too. Whether it’s work or personal, you have to draw the line somewhere. You cross that line at your peril.” Moir took a breath, then continued in a softer tone. “She’s been dead six months, Wey. Let her rest.”

And if she doesn’t want to,
he asked himself,
what then?

But he didn’t say it aloud. Instead he hung up the phone, dug out his maglite torch from the bottom kitchen drawer, and left the house.

~ * ~

Hollister caught a flash of crimson out of the corner of his eye as he pulled up in the empty lot. He wasn’t sure at first, but was certain the moment he left the car. Standing on the steep embankment, looking back down at him, was Cloe Flavell in her bright red coat. He opened his mouth to call to her, but thought better of it. She would wonder why he was there if he drew any more attention to himself. And if it
was
her, then his worst fears were unfounded.

But he still needed to know for sure.

He followed the route Constable Greiner had given him through the metal maintenance door and into the tunnels. It took him two passes to find the entrance to Jellyhead’s underground lair, but when he did locate the door he had no doubts that it was the right one. The smell was stronger by far on the other side of it. As he swept the torch around the room, he gagged for a very different reason.

Cloe Flavell lay on her back behind the table Greiner had described. Her clothes had been cut away down one side of her body, and long, deep incisions were visible in her pale flesh. There was blood everywhere—an impossible amount from such a small, pallid person. It appeared as though her head was pressed down hard against her chest, but the angles were all wrong. Hollister stepped gingerly closer, wary of disturbing the scene. An autopsy would confirm any guess he made, but he had to see, for his own peace of mind.

From closer to he saw that parts of her skeleton were missing: one long bone from her forearm, another from her shin; a dripping hole in her side suggested that a rib was gone, too, and maybe part of her spine. A step too many resolved his confusion about her face: her lower jaw had been removed, and what remained didn’t bear close examination.

Hollister averted his eyes and found Jellyhead on his side in a corner of the room, eyes open but just as motionless as Flavell. He checked for a pulse in the old man’s neck, but found none. When he pulled his fingers away, they were sticky with blood—Flavell’s blood, he presumed, since there was no apparent injury to the old man’s body. Mystic or otherwise, he was just dead, and in death he looked more pitiful than ever.

Hollister stood up, breathing heavily to fight a rising nausea. What had happened seemed obvious, at first glance. Flavell had come to check on Jellyhead, and he had killed her when she had arrived. Or he had stunned her when she had dropped him off the previous night, and killed her later. As there was no way such an old man could have overpowered a healthy young woman in the open, Hollister reasoned that he had taken her by surprise. There was a metal rod with blood on one end under the table, and a knife on the ground near Flavell’s body—the murder instrument and butchery tool respectively, Hollister assumed. Then, over-excited by his grisly deeds, Jellyhead had had a heart-attack and died.

The picture was complete, except for one detail: the “dressmaker’s dummy” was gone.

He raised the maglite to study the table surface more closely. It was splattered with what looked like dried excrement and plastered with dust and stray hairs. There was a small amount of blood, too, still sticky. Something had undoubtedly lain there; the splatters were confined to the table’s edges and hardly to be found in the middle. Furthermore, there was a half-empty roll of gaffer tape on the floor nearby, with an inch or so hanging loose and dust-free. There were a large number of plastic bags lying around the room that Greiner hadn’t reported; some of them were freshly emptied.

He could see it clearly. The object on the table, the sinisterly human-shaped and open-mouthed figure, had been the blow-up doll stolen from the porn shop. It had been filled with the excrement Jellyhead had collected, then made up on the outside with dead skin, discarded fingernails and loose hairs. Old clothes had completed the picture: a manikin constructed solely from discards, a Frankenstein’s monster made out of rubbish. But it hadn’t been finished.

He’ll need the bones before he’s done.

The police had been closing in, alerted by the theft. Jellyhead had been under pressure to finish before anyone discovered what he was up to. There wouldn’t be time to raid graveyards or morgues for what he needed—if the bones of the dead would even suffice. Hollister didn’t grasp the underlying illogic of the exercise; maybe only pieces from the recently-deceased would suffice. But the broad principles seemed clear. Jellyhead had been making a monster. Backed into a corner, he had taken the first and perhaps only chance he could to finish his work.

“The cost of living is so high,” Jellyhead had said. Hollister had it down on tape. “She needs me to find it for her, to put it together. She doesn’t want to be hard, but she will if she has to. She doesn’t like the darkness. She cries.”

Hollister took a step forward, the flash of crimson he had seen foremost on his mind: Flavell’s coat wasn’t anywhere in Jellyhead’s lair, yet she had been wearing it the previous day. Either someone had stolen it from the scene, or ... That the monster could actually move of its own accord didn’t seem so absurd, underground, in the charnel shadows, and the thought of taking chase urged him on. But he stopped well before reaching the door. He had been underground almost half an hour already. The trail would be cold by the time he emerged into the daylight again. He wouldn’t be able to use smell to track the thing in the city—and he didn’t know what he could do even if he caught up. Prick it with a silver needle? Catching up might be the last thing he wanted to do.

“She’s trying to come through,” the old man had said. “I don’t know where from. She’s just there, and she wants to be here.”

He turned and walked back to the table.

“Let it go.” Moir’s words filled the gore-splattered darkness. “Let it go ... “

He knew she was right, on all counts. What difference did the slip of a knife make? An old but respected surgeon made a mistake and might go unpunished if the lawyers failed to do their job properly— but that wasn’t the same as a killer hunting down a victim, even if the end result was the same. Maybe, in this case, there was an accomplice Hollister knew nothing about who had moved the thing on the table. Maybe it wasn’t as simple as it seemed on first
or
second viewing. Maybe only time, not rash stumbling about, flailing for answers, would expose the truth.

The tension within him broke as soon as he made up his mind. He would get back above ground and call for Moir. Someone else could take over, clean up the mess, put the pieces together and let him get on with his life as rationally as he could. It wouldn’t be his problem any more, whatever—and wherever
—it
was. There were no names, not even words, for such a thing. What would drive it? What reason could it possibly have for existing?

When he turned, it was standing in the doorway. The stench had returned with it. He was becoming so used to the smell that he hadn’t noticed.

“I came back,” it said with Arna’s voice. “I missed you.”

He stared at her, frozen, as she took a step into the light.

After a long pause, he lowered the torch.

<>

~ * ~

INTRODUCTION TO:

...................................ENTRÉ LES BEAUX MORTS EN VIE

(AMONG THE BEAUTIFUL LIVING DEAD)

Rob Hood is Australia’s undisputed Zombie King. I first met him in
1994,
at a small con in Sydney’s inner West. There are lots of reasons to fondly recall that encounter. One of them, his urging of me to try writing a zombie story, led to two stories in this collection—two stories of which I am particularly proud, for very different reasons.

This story was the first of them. (I talk about the other in the notes to “Passing the Bone.”) It took shape very quickly: the richness of the world and the word-play I allowed myself (never had my spotty knowledge of the French language been so tested) were leagues beyond anything I’d attempted in a short story before.

I also enjoyed the challenge of writing sex scenes (something I’d avoided in the past) and mucking around with airships (who doesn’t?).

I called the thing
“De Rigeur Mortis”
and put it in a drawer, figuring its length and lack of plot would make it unsellable. Thereby demonstrating my occasional thickheadedness.

Jump ahead a year or two to my third and last shot at getting into Jack Dann and Janeen Webb’s World Fantasy Award-winning anthology
Dreaming Down-Under.
In desperation after two rejections, I pulled this story out of the drawer, changed the name (thankfully sanity had been restored) and sent it in. The acceptance came immediately. My story opened the book and went on to be recommended by
Locus.
I still receive emails from people wanting to read the novel.