CHAPTER ONE
The Giggling Ghost
Dinnertime
had come at last to the final Thursday in April; the sky that had been
threatening snow all day with its falling temperatures and teary drizzle, had
finally acquiesced, and as the sun turned its golden gaze from the city of
River Bay, small, delicate flakes—like ashes from some distant fire—began to
salt the sidewalks and windshields of the city. Springtime in Minnesota.
With
the snow had come the darkness of night. Alleys and gutters had coughed up
shadows that spread like ink dripped into water, blurring the edges of the
buildings and blotting out the surrounding nature of River Bay until it was
nothing but a collection of floating orange and white window panes, and the odd
multi-colored eyes of stoplights. As a city headed home from work, free from
the day’s drudgery and anxious for the delayed delivery of summer, a lone
figure, shrouded in black, made its way to a more curious destination.
Oakland
Cemetery had no gated fence around it to keep the dead in or the riff-raff out,
which made it a hot spot for those who tended to show up at such places long
after such gates might have closed anyways. Largely teenagers looking to get
drunk in seclusion, vandals busting headstones, or self-styled sorcerers who
practiced at fabricated occult nonsense, wrapped up in the notion that they had
a winking third eye open to some ethereal truth that the rest of mankind had
not. The consensus around the River Bay Parks and Recreation office was that
the cemetery was secluded enough, pushed back in thick patches of brambles
halfway up a bluffside overlooking the city, and pain-in-the-ass-enough to get
to in good weather by daylight, that there wasn’t much call for the expenditure
of erecting a barrier. Some century-plus after it had fallen out of use, there
were more beer bottle shards and bits of fast food packaging lodged in the dirt
than grave markers, and most of the relatives of the few corpses interred
there, had long moved on or withered away themselves; most in the newer,
sprawling Pine Shade Cemetery at the foot of the bluff.
Ask
the River Bay P.D. about cult activity in their city, and they’d be apt to tell
you the closest thing they had to one was The Ladyslippers Club: a clutch of
septuagenarians who got together on Thursday nights to share Crock-Pot
casseroles and local gossip. And yet, now, faintly dusted in the chalky
moonlight bleeding through the overcast night sky, bathed in the penumbrae of
the rough tombstones jutting from the hard ground like the great teeth of some
half-buried dinosaur, moved a living shadow.
The
figure approached the graveyard, pausing as it crossed under the half-collapsed,
trellised metal archway that read OAKLA D C MET RY. Satisfied that it was alone
and unwatched, the silhouette continued into the throng of the weathered
headstones. The figure moved with purpose, its shadowy form swimming through
the gaps between the markers as if it had done so many times before.
Finally
it came to pause in a small clearing before a time- and weather-eroded
sepulcher, no bigger than a garden tool shed. It was a thin, squat building of
limestone, it’s ornamental cornices chipped and covered with the weedy remnants
of dead nightshade vines. The dark figure knelt by the base of the structure.
With gloved hands, it lifted a rust-pocked, cobweb-coated urn on the right of
the lower of two steps leading up to the gated entrance to the tomb. The lifted urn triggered a mechanism,
causing the wrought iron gate caging the door of the sepulcher to unlatch and
swing wide. The figure paused again, taking another survey of the dark, snow
dabbed woods beyond the cemetery. The black figure set the urn back in its
place and stepped up into the entrance of the sepulcher, melting into the black
aperture as if it had in fact been an errant part of it returning to the whole.
After
the figure had vanished within, the iron gate once again closed and sealed
itself. A stiff, bracing wind
threaded through the skeletal tips of the still-nude tree branches that
whiskered the bluffs, crashing against the tombstones like a ghost wave,
obliterating any trace of the mysterious visitor and its secret in its tide.
Though
night had indeed fallen and blotted up Mankato Avenue, not all were aware of
it. In fact, a parade or a fire could have swept the street both ways in front
of The Spying Eye booksellers, and its proprietor would have been none the
wiser. It was one of the few businesses left on the quiet thoroughfare; a
street that had once been a main artery between the highway and the river, the
two landmarks boxing in most of River Bay, but was now a quiet, largely
residential area on the east side of the city. The shop was an appealingly
rustic brownstone storefront, with an unassuming, and just-north-of-dilapidated,
apartment occupying its second floor. Over the front door of the shop hung a
sign, now flagging in the wind, depicting a magnifying glass with a large human
eye set within the circular frame of its lens.
Inside the shop,
amongst the smell of yellowed paperbacks and chai tea, quite unaware that
closing time had come and gone an hour ago, sat its proprietor: a small, portly
man with a fuzzy brown caterpillar moustache sleeping above his upper lip. He
was engrossed in a book about Amazon headhunters—the Ecuadorian Shuar Indians,
and their now-taboo ritualistic practice of producing tsantsas, or shrunken heads.
As he was
reading, a fluffy gray tabby leapt onto the countertop near the register and
walked, stretching its legs in the process, to the open book. The cat circled and
sat itself in the center of the open pages, mrow-ing
in the little bald man’s face. Clearly the king was requesting an audience with
his attendant.
“Hello, Raffles.
What can I do for you?” A glance at the clock on the wall told him it was
shortly after six o’clock.
“Dinner time
already?” the man muttered. “I’ve lost track of time. My apologies. Let me
prepare your plates.”
Raffles
responded by bashing his forehead into the man’s chin and dragging his fuzzy
little face across his jaw.
“Wentworth!” the
man called, stepping out from behind his counter. “Dinner!” His summons
produced another cat, a buff colored tabby who appeared from some obscured
sleeping space amongst the books in the shop.
After adroitly
scooping the pungent pâté from the cat food can, and smearing it onto two
saucers, he set the plates down in the kitchen of the small apartment attached
to the back of the shop. It was the living space he shared with his two feline
roommates. The cats having been fed, he stepped back into the bookshop and drew
the shade over the glass of the front door, locking it tightly and testing the
handle. He switched the fluorescent lights off and lingered a moment in the
dark, his spectacled eyes surveying the darkness outside, partially exposed in
the pumpkin-orange glow of the nearest corner streetlight.
What mysteries
were lurking out there, unraveling beyond the scope of observation? What
villains were secretly formulating their next attempt at public destruction or
vile treachery?
It seemed
laughable in this sequestered little burg, but the fact remained that though
the prominence of River Bay had been washed downstream as its founding logging
industry had been pulped, reduced now to a sleepy college town, it somehow had
accumulated a magnetic draw for darkness. It wasn’t common knowledge, but
without this unassuming little man, the unassuming little city of River Bay
would have been ground up within the gears of the sinister machinations of that
masked fiend The Salamander, or crushed beneath the designer heels of that
perfidious millionaire—and secret crime king—Richard Esquire, aka The Whispering
Skull!
There had been
many threats to the city, but they had all been thwarted. Thwarted by a round
little man with a fuzzy caterpillar moustache, his face hidden behind the
sackcloth mask of his alter ego: The Giggling Ghost!
Back in his
apartment, Hollis Hastings, self-made super-sleuth, filled his teakettle and
set it on the burner of his stove. He switched on his police radio, nestled
into the over-stuffed armchair where he did his best thinking, and waited,
fingers steepled before his lips.
There was
nothing that required his services so far. A car pulled over just outside of
town for having expired license plate tabs; a report of a break and entry in a
garage on Belleview, about a mile west of the bookstore, and a drunk and
disorderly at one of the college bars downtown.
The night would
prove uneventful, but with the new day would come a new adventure for The
Giggling Ghost!
*
There was a feint mechanical whir as the lid of the coffin closed, and the dark form of the mystery figure, lying supine in the folds of the moth-eaten satin lining, began to slowly lower. The satin-lined interior came to a stop some thirty feet beneath the floor of the sepulchre, and tilted upward. The dark stranger walked off down a narrow earthen hallway, just tall enough and wide enough to accommodate his figure; the passage lit every so often with electric lamps bolted to wooden supports along the walls.
At a point, after a half-mile or so of walking, the tunnel bent downward, and the figure paused again, this time at a tangle of thick tree roots snaking from the seeming dead end wall of earth before him. A black-gloved hand grasped an imperceptibly artificial segment of root, and twisted it just slightly. The roots parted like saloon doors, revealing an alcove. The black stranger stepped into the large crevice, closing the rootball door behind it. The cloistered space the figure now knelt in, concealed behind the camouflaged root barricade, was in fact the box platform of a small freight elevator–a dumbwaiter leading to the basement of a house high atop the bluff overshadowing River Bay.
The platform rose through over twelve-hundred feet of stony soil, coming to rest beneath a large grandfather clock in a lavishly furnished den in the house's basement. The figure in black stepped out of the hollow clock, walking through the narrow glass door beneath its face, and into the large room. The figure removed his dark mask, revealing a middle-aged man, his turnip-shaped head capped with a wild shock of white hair. A large, soot-black scar ran diagonal from above his left eyebrow, over the bridge of his aquiline nose, to just below his right eye-socket. His eyes themselves were obscured behind thick black lenses, strapped to his face in what appeared to be some sort of welding goggles.
The man passed through the room, seemingly out of place and unconcerned with the marvelous antiques that adorned it, and passed into another room. His laboratory. The fluorescent lights flickered on with a reedy, mosquito-like whine. A smile raised the sagging, dour flaps of his stern features as he surveyed his workshop. Rows of operating tables stretched across the room, each one occupied by a figure–a corpse–entwined in a series of hoses and cables, all feeding into a large machine against the room's west wall.
"The preparations have been made, my children," the man said. "Tomorrow we begin Operation Puppetmaster! Starting tomorrow, the city of River Bay, and the planet, for that matter, will know the name Zomnombulance!
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