Last Impressions (The Marnie Baranuik Files) (35 page)

Where there is ectoplasm, there had, at some point, been a ghost.
More than one, perhaps. They liked, or didn’t like, this sink for a
reason.
I pulled the latex gloves up around my wrists better, feeling the corner of my upper lip turn up. Ignoring the fact that I was here
because of my own cat-snuffing-grade curiosity, I snarled, “I fucking hate this job.”

The ectoplasm was colder than ice water, and plunging my hands into it might have been the most disgusting thing I’d done
since watching a zombie-revenant hybrid devour its own coffin-birthed
fetus, still dangling from the umbilical cord. The sink goo wasn’t as thick as it looked, more like gravy than gelatin, and, as I fished around, my fingertips brushed something hard under the swampy fur of my hat.

I pulled it out of the sink and turned it to face me, pinching my lips together tightly. My heart had started an uneven jig against my ribcage, fluttering unhappily. I placed it on the counter top to the left of the sink, shoving aside some crusty dishes. My hat lay across the
top like a deflated toad beret on the world's ugliest and most
emaciated mime. With two fingers I pulled the hat off the skull and it slithered back into the sink.

“Hey, Longshanks,” I called out. “Evidence ate my hat! I'm
gonna need a receipt and a stiff drink.”

HE DIDN'T BRING
either thing I'd asked for. His heavy tread hurried toward me, but I couldn’t take my eyes off my sad prize.
Thickened
ectoplasm clumped in the pit of an eye socket like a snail pulled from its shell. I’d never eat escargot again. Not that I ever had, but this convinced me not to start. I'd probably have to swear off raw oysters, too.

The skull had a hole in the top. Ectoplasm sluiced out the jaw and oozed from the nasal cavities. I desperately wanted to rinse it off, not just because I wanted to see it in greater detail, but because
the bony visage before me had once belonged to a person, a rather important fact that was not lost on me. The slime, regardless of its
otherworldly source, seemed an obscene, intimate defacement. I imagined someone handling my skull a hundred and fifty years after
my death, and thought I might enjoy a show of respect. A bubble appeared in the ectoplasm in the nasal cavity from some air captured inside, and I couldn’t look away until it surfaced and burst silently.

Schenk’s breath was unsteady behind me as he stood without speaking for a moment. I tilted my head back and got a great view of his Adam’s apple bobbing convulsively. Then he said, “I never liked that hat, anyway. I’ll get an evidence bag.”

“Can I rinse this gunk off?”

“Nope,” he said, and went to the front door, where he’d
dropped his own bag of gear from his trunk. He was back a moment later, the bag held in front of him, opened delicately.

I picked up the skull to drop it in the bag when the kitchen light
blinked out, pitching us into relative darkness. The microwave went
ding
and started cooking nothing, the little plate inside churning
around and around.

I held the skull over the sink so it wouldn’t drip on the already grungy floor. “Leftovers?”

The sound on the TV in the other room blared on for a second,
and one of the Mythbusters screamed something about gaining altitude and then cut off abruptly.

I set the skull down on the counter. The lights flickered back on with a buzzing complaint, first one long fluorescent tube, then the other.

Schenk and I stood still and looked around the small space.

“Hello?” I said experimentally.

Schenk lowered the bag. The microwave stopped, beeped twice
to tell us it was done, and went dark. He raised the bag, and
prompted me with a look. I picked up the skull and tried to put it in the bag again. The lights above shut off and the TV blared. I caught the tail end of a cereal jingle.

I put the skull back on the counter and the TV went silent.

“A certain dead sassybritches does
not
want this skull to go in
the bag,” I said.

“It’s going to end up there sooner or later,” Schenk advised quietly. The overhead lights went back on.

This time we were not alone; from the picture I’d stolen from
Scarrow, I recognized John Briggs-Adsit, a full phantom right down to his boots. He was cowering on the floor in front of the fridge, his arms covering his head. He looked like he was crying, but no
sniveling sounds could be heard.

“Are you seeing this?” Schenk whispered.

“He’s trying to distract us,” I guessed. “Sorry, Longshanks, I have to rinse this skull off. It’s more than him just not wanting us to put it in the bag. There’s something he doesn’t want us to see.”

I plunged my gloved hand back into the sink and pulled the plug. It came up with a slimy, sucking noise, and I left it resting atop
an old bowl of hardened spaghetti with a dead bug in it. The ectoplasm
began to drain out noisily in gulps and schlorps, and I ran the hot tap to coax it along. Schenk made an uncertain noise but did not order me to stop; he was far too busy staring wordlessly at his very first apparition. I sensed he wanted to back away, but was resolutely standing his
ground.

I ran my gloves under the tap, wishing the water would warm up. The pipes clanked and groaned and the drain gurgled, choking on the sludge. I rinsed the skull, and then rinsed my gloves a second time, swishing the gunk off the sides of the sink.

“He’s watching you,” Schenk said. I peeled the latex gloves off and threw them in the sink, drying my hands on a not-so-clean, fairly stiff dish towel hanging from the bar on the stove.

“Well, unless he’s going to speak to us, he’s a distraction. What's it gonna be this time, Johnny? You gonna talk, or does Bugsy here need to get rough with ya?”

I made shooing motions at the cowering, spectral soldier, and he fled like mist blowing past headlights, disappearing near my hands and reappearing in a stuttering, strobe-like fashion further away. I'd seen Harry shadow step, flying from shadow to shadow faster than any mortal could move, but this was different, like watching an old movie with a bunch of frames missing. Schenk followed, digging out his phone to take a video clip. I paused, letting Schenk get a good, long view of it, and then herded the spirit into the hall closet where he appeared again, crouching among a half-dozen pairs of mud-crusted sneakers. When I was confident he’d stay, I slammed the door. On Schenk’s wrist. He bellowed impressively.

“Sorry! Shit! Sorry. Sorry. You stay in there,” I told the ghost, who promptly faded. Above the last trail of fog in the air was a beat-up Montreal Canadiens jacket with an envelope protruding from the pocket. I snatched it up. Scarrow’s pictures, smeared with a single splotch of ectoplasm.

“Aha!” I closed the closet door again.

Schenk cradled his injured paw and showed it to me with a thunderous glower. “I don't think a
door
is going to stop a
ghost
, eh?”

“Sorry. Lost my head in the heat of battle. Sorry.” I told whoever still wanted to listen to me, “Tough it out, soldiers. Look, I bet these are the pictures Barnaby stole from Father Frisky when he was swiping the skull.”

“I find it hard to believe that ghost killed both my victims when you scared him into a closet by shaking your finger at him.”

“I have awesome finger guns, man.” I sifted through the photographs, wandering back through the kitchen, Schenk on my
heels. One of the
photos was similar to the
carte de visite
I’d taken from Scarrow;
Mother and John Briggs-Adsit, 1864. Mother wearing a crystal vial necklace and holding a giant wooden spoon.

“Hunh,” I said. “Maybe Barnaby wasn’t just looking for ghoulish collectibles. He was curious about this ghost, too.” For some reason I
found the spoon in Mother Briggs-Adsit’s hand mesmerizing.
“Harry saw this same spirit dude in my room at North House. He was
cowardly, crouching, flinching. Definitely not aggressive. He just
dicked with the plumbing and fucked up my plans for a nice, hot bath.” Schenk didn't need to know about the exceedingly steamy shower that I got instead.

“Maybe this skull belongs to one of them?”

“I can tell you right now, it’s not his mother’s skull.” I went back to the sink and re-gloved when Schenk almost absently handed me fresh latex. “Look at the long, narrow nasal cavity, the rounded supraorbital margin, heavy bony glabella.” I showed him between where the eyebrows would have been, and then swept the forehead with gloved fingers. “Backward slanting forehead.” I stroked down the jaw. “Square mandible,” I ran my finger behind the area where
his ear would have been. “Large mastoid process. This skull
belonged to a man.” I looked at the top of it, “Look at that hole at the top.”

“Gunshot?”

“Nope. Skull rot.” I turned it to the light. The top of the skull seemed thin, fragile, like it had been eaten away. “To be specific,
these
holes were caused by bacterial damage. I’m no forensic
anthropologist, but I have seen this before. It looks like the late stages of the neurosyphilis.”

Schenk was flipping through the folded notes and yellowed
papers that had been carelessly crammed in the envelope with the pictures that Father Scarrow had carefully collected. “Captain John Briggs-Adsit, Cannoneer 34th New York Independent Field Battery, First Division, 9th Army Corps, A. P. discharged 8 APR 1864 SCD.”

I nodded sadly. “Syphilitic Chronis Disease,” I said. “Good ol’ pecker flu from houses of ill repute. Here, we have neurosyphilis;
you’d see this kind of damage in time.” I poked at the irregular holes in the top of his skull, and then spotted a series of fine lines and frowned. “But not this.” I brought the skull as close to my face as I dared and angled it into the lamp light even more. “This is blunt force trauma.
Right here.” I pointed at a spot. “See the radiating fractures?” I tilted it to peer inside the holes at the innermost layer of the skull. “The
skull is actually three layers, two hard layers sandwiching a spongier one.”

Schenk made an affirmative noise to tell me he knew this
already. “This trauma was forceful enough to shatter all three.”

“Keeping in mind that John’s bones were previously damaged by the neurosyphilis, this may not have been an intentionally lethal blow.”

“After two hundred years I’m sure the bones would have taken damage.”

“Like I said, I’m not a forensic anthropologist, but I’d like to have someone who is look at this skull, the sooner the better.”

“Have to run it to Hamilton,” Schenk said, holding out a larger evidence bag. “What are you thinking?”

“Spit balling an idea or two,” I warned him, in case he was taking my word as an expert opinion, which it was not. “Some later
side effects of the syphilis would have been troublesome for someone like
Mother Briggs-Adsit, who, according to Father Scarrow, had a
notoriously bad temper. Her grown son could have become frustrating to live with and care for: incontinence, confusion, psychosis… What if she hit him?”

He pointed to the picture. “With her giant wooden spoon?”

“Spoon of Doom. With a skull weakened by neurosyphilis like this, he could have been killed without her meaning to.” I thought
about it.
“If he was killed unintentionally, he may not have understood what happened. His confusion may have caused him to linger after death.”

“And after her own death,” he said, “Mother remains to care for John’s spirit with her own.”

I sighed. “And then these idiots stumble on the wrong grave.”

“Couldn’t have happened upon a worse pair to disturb.”

“Not only do they take her necklace, they take her son’s skull.”

“To use as a decoration.”

“Britney had kinder motives. Contact. Discovery. But if Mother Briggs-Adsit thought Britney was investigating the manner of her son’s death…”

“Guilt. Shame.”

“Followed closely by anger.” I shook my head. “A disaster
waiting to happen. We need to find that necklace.”

“Then what are we going to do?”

Then I guess I team up with Father Spankass and work together to exorcise a homicidal poltergeist?
“One thing at a time, Longshanks. Can I put the sound on the TV?” I asked. “It’s creepy quiet in here.”

“Shouldn’t we be listening for ghosts?”

“Fuck ghosts,” I said, picking up the remote control. “They’re here. We’re here. We know it, they know it. I’m done listening. You mind?”

“You’re the paranormal exp—“

Something hit the back of my hand, knocking the remote into
Schenk’s bristly chin. His head jerked back but he made no
complaint save a frown.

“See that?” I pointed at Schenk so the spirit would notice him. “That’s a cop that cannot even handle it right now. So knock that shit off.”

Schenk glowered at the room and then went back to search the bedroom again. I turned the TV to the local weather channel and
stared at the everyday, mundane joy of a perfectly normal storm report.

The meteorologist said merrily, “Tracking this latest storm’s approach with that wide cold front coming down from the arctic, the
blizzard conditions extend all the way into Pennsylvania and north
into the Muskokas. Here in the Niagara region we’re expecting between twenty-five and forty-five centimeters of lake effect snow
by the end of Friday and into Saturday morning, with some of the worst weather picking up again Sunday afternoon. Expect winds gusting up to eighty kilometers an hour, and temperatures hovering around minus five before wind chill, but it’s going to feel a whole lot colder than that, folks. With much of the region already blanketed by the week’s accumulation, and drifting snow and whiteout conditions making driving treacherous, authorities are asking that people stay in their homes and off the streets unless travel is absolutely necessary. We may be looking at a record snowfall this weekend. Of course, as always, our friends in Buffalo will be worst hit by this storm, with a snowfall totals for the week approaching a meter…”