Ungrateful Dead

UNGRATEFUL DEAD

an ethan banning case

UNGRATEFUL DEAD

a short story

NAOMI CLARK

Ungrateful Dead

Copyright © 2011 by Naomi Clark

http://naomiclark.net

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Dedication

This short story is for anyone who, like me, loves a down-on-his-luck private eye. Surely I’m not the only one?

Ungrateful Dead

In case you
ever wondered, the “p” in “PI” stands for “private.” Not “phantom” or “paranormal” or anything else to do with ghosts and that shit. I don’t normally have to explain that to people, but Charlie Mullen had been pawing at me for an hour now, insisting that private investigators really could investigate haunted morgues as easily as cheating wives, and it was starting to make my head ache.

Charlie was one of those guys you just know got bullied at school. All weedy and twitchy, and probably even worse with women than me. I’d been pretty surprised to find him in Sylvester’s bar tonight at all. It’s the kind of place you only go if you’re broke or pathologically incapable of forming meaningful relationships. I was both, so I pretty much lived there, but as far as I knew, Charlie had plenty of money and worked with dead people, so probably wasn’t interested in meaningful relationships with the living.

Sylvester’s is dirty, cheap, and nasty, like the clientele. The decor is depressing, the beer is watered down, and the peanuts are so salty you have to keep drinking the beer. The jukebox is always playing Johnny Cash and the light bulb in the mens’ washroom is always flickering. It’s got a certain sleazy charm though, personified by Jenny the barmaid and her orange cleavage. I was trying to admire said cleavage right now, but Charlie wouldn’t shut up and let me concentrate.

“Seriously, Ethan. Just as a favour to me. One night, that’s all. As a favour.” He tugged at my coat sleeve to get my attention.

I sighed and shrugged him off. “Charlie, I spent the whole day rooting through a pro-golfer’s garbage looking for used condoms for his paranoid wife. I don’t need this shit, okay? I just want to drink my bad beer and go home and watch some bad TV. I’m not spending the night at the morgue with you. I don’t care how haunted it is.”

“I’m not asking for anything big,” he said indignantly. “I just want some back-up, some proof so my boss will believe me. All you have to do is take a few pictures...”

“No.” I downed the rest of my beer and signalled to Jenny for a refill. “Not interested.”

“I’ll pay whatever your going rate is.”

I shot him a sideways glance then. He gazed at me through coke-bottle glasses, thin face mournful and eager, like a Basset hound. I’ve got a soft spot for dogs. Especially if they’re going to give me money. “Tell you what,” I said as Jenny plonked a fresh beer in front of me, “how about we go and sit down and talk about this, okay? You can tell me what exactly the problem is and I’ll advise you accordingly. Call it an initial consultation.”

“Great!”

“And that’ll cost one hundred and fifty dollars,” I added.

“Oh ... great.” Charlie’s shoulders slumped, either from relief or disappointment. Hard to tell with the dodgy lights in here. He followed me over to a table in the corner, away from the jukebox and Johnny’s song of woe, and I set about rolling a cigarette while Charlie gave me his own sob story. Nobody paid attention to little things like smoking bans in Sylvester’s. Smoke adds ambiance to a room, right?

“It started about a month ago. You remember that robbery at Cloth Encounters? The lingerie shop? The girl that died came to me after the autopsy. The police couldn’t find any next of kin, so she was there for over a week before they decided to just have her cremated. But after that, weird stuff started happening. Little things at first, like the lights flickering on and off, even if the bulbs were new. Fluctuations in temperature too – they say that’s a classic sign of haunting, don’t they?” He peered at me over his glasses, demanding a response.

“Yeah, I guess they do,” I replied vaguely. Sounded to me like the morgue needed a good electrician and a better air-con system, but I’ve never had a paranormal experience in my life so what do I know? “What else? Walls dripping blood, anything like that?”

He sniffed, slumping back in his seat. “Things going missing. Just little things at first, paperwork, pens, like that. But then two weeks ago –” He cut himself off, face chalky-white like he might be sick. “Two weeks ago,” he whispered hoarsely, “one of the bodies ...
moved.
”

“Moved how? Like twitching-toes moved, or did a little jig moved, or what?” I leaned forwards, interested now despite myself. Could be someone was just screwing with Charlie’s head – and I didn’t think it would take much – or could be we had a genuine body-snatcher on our hands, if this corpse had disappeared entirely. That might be interesting. Probably not as interesting as Jenny’s cleavage, but who knew?

“Moved,” Charlie repeated, eyes burning into me now as he tried to impress on me how goddam serious this all was, “as in sat up on the trolley and stared at me.” He turned green now, sweat beading on his forehead, fingers tapping erratically on the tabletop. “For a good minute or so, it just stared at me. Didn’t speak, but I knew it was her. The girl from Cloth Encounters. She’d possessed the corpse somehow. She...”

I held up my hand to silence him. “Charlie,” I said carefully, “I’ve got to ask this, so don’t be pissy, okay? Had you been drinking that night? Taking any medication –“

“Ethan! When have you ever seen me drinking?”

I shrugged. “We don’t hang out a lot. You might have a whole bunch of bad habits I don’t know about. You might be a secret crackhead.”

“Well I’m not,” he flared, scowling at me. “I wasn’t drunk or high or stressed or tired or anything else. I know what I saw.”

“Okay.” I finished my beer and assessed him. “What else has been happening?”

“Well, no more bodies have moved,” he said, “but everything else – the lights, things disappearing, the temperature stuff, that’s kept on. And I feel someone watching me, all the time. But my boss doesn’t believe me, and I just want some proof, Ethan. Just someone who’s word he’ll trust.”

That pleading Basset hound look was back on his face. I shifted around in my torn leather seat, uncomfortable. God knows why Charlie thought my word was one his boss would trust. I mean, I’m a bum, right? I’m one missed rent payment away from being a full-time hobo and I had cold noodles for breakfast this morning. I wish I was joking about that. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a good PI, but I’m pretty fucking useless at everything else in life. You wouldn’t look at me and think,
Ethan Banning. Now there’s a stand-up guy who I can rely on
. More like,
Ethan Banning. Why does that guy always smell like Chinese food?

If anything, I imagined me chipping in and saying, yeah, the morgue is totally haunted, would just make Charlie look worse. I mean, first off, who hires a private dick for a haunted morgue in the first place? And second, what kind of self-respecting private dick takes the case?

My silence was making Charlie nervous. “Just spend a couple hours there with me,” he said. “I trust you, Ethan. You’re not a bullshitter. If you spend some time there and tell me I’m imagining everything, I’ll let it go.”

“I dunno ...” I sighed, pushing my empty glass around listlessly. That pro-golfer’s garbage had been pretty nasty. I’d planned an evening of flirting in vain with Jenny, then going home to shower and wait for my paycheck from the golfer’s wife to arrive. The morgue didn’t really fit in there.

“I’ll double your usual fee,” Charlie pushed.

I guess I wasn’t as self-respecting as I like to believe. I finished my cigarette and dropped the dog end into my beer glass. “Let’s move.”

You know what, you can get a lot of noodles for double my usual fee.

***

Something like seventy thousand people are listed as missing in the USA right now, so it’s probably not surprising that missing person cases make up the bulk of my work. Sometimes the cases end happily, reunited families skipping through flower-filled meadows to hug, that sort of thing. More often they just ... end, with no trace of the missing person to be found, no matter how hard you look. And sometimes the cases end at the morgue. Those are the worst.

So I know the city morgue pretty well. Better than I’d like, at any rate. It’s an old, grim building, brickwork tagged with gang graffiti, windows smeared with grime and exhaust fumes. Inside it’s spanking clean – stinking of bleach and weird chemicals they use to preserve the dead. The floors are sparkling white, the walls are suicide-grey. Charlie loves the morgue. Not in an inappropriate way or anything, but you can tell by how his eyes light up when he sees the place that it’s all he’s got in life. I look at two-for-one pizza coupons the same way.

“I really appreciate this,” he told me as he let us in. The slight hitch in his breath spoke of fear and excitement. He trotted down the hallway, flicking light switchs as he went. Electricity crackled and the lights buzzed, flickering constantly. He scowled up at the fittings. “This
never
happened before she showed up. Everything round here always worked perfectly.”

I had to admit, the place felt creepy. Not just normal dead-people-are-here creepy, which was how the morgue always felt to me, but like there was an extra layer of ice in the air, an extra edge of darkness in the corridors. I’m not superstitious. I don’t believe in God or worry about the afterlife, and I didn’t expect to find any ghosts downstairs in body storage. And despite that, I had to admit there were cold fingers running down my spine.

We passed by the waiting mortuary, where bodies were taken to be confirmed as actually dead, and I couldn’t help glance through the wide windows at the metal trolleys inside. Part of me expected to see some shadowy figure flitting around there. Not many places used waiting mortuaries anymore; they were a throwback to Victorian fears about being buried alive, and medical advances meant not too many people worried about that anymore. But hell, if you were going to see a ghost, that’s where I’d expect to see it.

“Nobody else has noticed your ghost then?” I asked Charlie, shifting my bag around on my shoulder to try and shake the chills. I was loaded down with my hi-tech PI stake-out kit – digital camera, video camera, polaroid camera, notebook, pen, bottle of Jack Daniels.

“Well, the receptionist mentioned hearing whispering a couple of times, but that’s it.” Charlie glanced back at me, pleading silently for me to believe him. “Do you need to speak to her?”

“Nah, I’ll take your word for it.” We headed downstairs to the basement, where bodies lay stiff and cold in metal drawers, and, possibly, ghosts wandered. The chills down my spine got colder. I considered cracking open the Jack to warm myself up, then decided Charlie might not pay me if I was drunk on the job.

The staircase down to the cold chamber was narrow and dark. Charlie flipped the light switch on and off several times, muttering darkly when the light didn’t come on. “See?” he said. “This never happened before.”

I glanced up at the bulb over the stairs. “You tried just changing the bulb, right?”

“I’m not an idiot, Ethan! I asked the janitor to change it three times.”

“And has he actually done it yet?”

He glowered at me and stomped down the stairs. I followed, one hand against the rough wall to guide myself. I had a pretty nasty vision of slipping and cracking my head open as I bounced down the steps, and that wasn’t how I wanted to go out.

Charlie unlocked the basement door, letting a fresh flood of that chemical tang into the hallway. I sneezed and he whipped round to scowl at me.

“What?”

“Cover your nose when you sneeze! Do you know how many germs you just spread into the atmosphere?”

“Really? That’s what you’re most worried about down here in the morgue? Germs from the living?”

“It’s just good manners, Ethan.”

I shrugged and followed him into the cold chamber. Frigid air sank into me. This was a postive temperature chamber, meant to preserve the bodies for a few weeks, but not cold enough to stop decomposition. Charlie flipped the light switch and was rewarded this time with dim, cool light that shone on the rows of drawers. I didn’t want to think too much about which were empty and which were occupied, but it’s like trying not to think about pink elephants. As soon as your mind goes there, it’s too late, and suddenly every drawer was home to a friend, my mom, my dad, my childhood dog, all slowly rotting away. And then a little creepy voice in my head whispered
one day, it’ll be you in there
.

I twitched, reconsidering drinking on the job. To distract myself from my ghoulish thoughts, I followed Charlie around the cold chamber to a desk in the corner. It was piled high with files and papers, and a little rubber duck painted to look like a zombie. Charlie’s desk. I don’t know how he stood working down here. I’d only been in here a minute or two and I was already shivering, from the cold and a good dash of nerves. Charlie looked pretty comfortable though, slipping into his chair and shuffling some papers around.

“This is where I see her,” he explained. “I’ve never seen her anywhere else in the building, so I figured this was the best place to start.”

“Makes sense.” I dropped my bag on the desk in the space he’d cleared and took out my cameras, noting a digital thermometer on the wall over the desk. “What’s the normal temperature in here?”

“Four degrees celcius,” he replied promptly. “But when she’s around, it drops down to around minus thirty. Luckily that doesn’t impact on the bodies.”

It would impact on my body though. I didn’t fancy spending the night down here with just a Detroit Rock City t-shirt and my battered leather jacket for insulation. “You got security cameras down here,” I remarked, indicating them in the corners of the ceiling. “Can’t we do our stakeout upstairs?”