Monday, March 19, 2018

THE GIGGLING GHOST vs DR. ZOMNOMBULANCE, CHAPTER ONE

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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