Vivisepulture (38 page)

“And then what?” I asked. “That’s years-“

“Sorting out the estate. Not an easy thing to do. Mr Wentworth’s only proof of death is his continuing absence. Now I want Ms. Levinger to do something for me.”

“I’m here,” she confirmed to the telephone.

“I want you to ring the solicitors who did the estate administration and tell them there’s a problem with the house. Tell them you’re ringing on behalf of Ada Platt. That should get through to them. Get them worried. They might tell you something.”

“But that’s…” She looked at me, in Walther’s absence. I shrugged. “I’ll try it,” she agreed.

“Good. I’m on my way back,” Walther confirmed.

I went back into the bathroom. Joseph Wentworth, I thought. Joseph Wentworth, sad and alone after his wife had gone… well perhaps it was a classic ghost situation, but… Walther had said that he had
disappeared
. No body had been found.

The smell was getting to me. Rot was rot, and I suddenly felt very queasy. The only thing that steadied me was the sheer nastiness of it. A decomposing body does not smell as bad as that bathroom did.

“Joseph Wentworth?” I said, into that stinking silence. Now I’m not psychic. I leave that to Walther. I’m as un-mystical as you can be, which is why I’m useful to him. When I said that name, though, something was there. I just felt a tide of… loathing, cold hate, pour over me, just for a moment. I had something’s attention.

“Time to speak to Mr Wentworth,” said Walther when he came back. Ms. Levinger was diligently talking her way through the channels of the Data Protection Act. It was probably a good time for Walther to exercise his skills while she was distracted. “Just the light kit for now, and we’ll see what we can reach.”

“Are you sure? We don’t know what happened to the plumbers.” I did my voice of reason bit.

“I think something very nasty almost certainly happened to all three of them,” said Walther briskly. “They, however, did not know what they were dealing with. Suicides, Michael. Suicides are a specialist subject. You have to treat them properly. Think of it as talking to someone who’s currently really depressed but liable to fly into a rage if you don’t humour them. Thankfully, as long as you commiserate they’re usually fairly easy to manipulate.”

“Into doing what?”

Walther chuckled. “Giving up the ghost. Going away. The act of suicide itself is usually what creates the ghost: that last moment of utter wretched despair, and perhaps even a moment when, all too late, they change their mind. It happens. Usually a simple laying to rest of the body will assist. We’ll get the whole sorry story, but at the end of it we’ll know where his remains are stashed. Sometimes just letting the ghost go on about its problems is enough to get rid of it.”

“A kind of supernatural agony aunt.”

“If you like.” He looked about the bathroom with distaste. “I’m afraid that as this seems to be the focus, we’ll have to set up her, unpalatable as it may be. I bought these.” They were swimming-pool nose-clips. “They’re not going to help the dignity of the situation but we’ll have to live with it.”

We set up quickly, Walther drawing a circle in the muck on the floor and making a few marks at the cardinal points. We stood inside, awkwardly close, and Walther lit a candle and passed it to me. It was probably scented but didn’t stand a chance in that room. 

“Mr Wentworth,” Walther said softly. I looked nervously at the open bathroom door, for the moment fearing Ms. Levinger’s wrath or scorn more than any ghost. I missed whatever it was that Walther felt, but I could guess.

“He isn’t happy,” said Walther. “Being ignored so long will do that for you.”

“Does it make you eat plumbers?”

“It might. Mr. Wentworth, why don’t you come and have a word. You must have something to get off your chest. I’ve a sympathic ear,” Walther said, voice reverential.

I felt something, then, another surge of furious emotion. Walther gripped my hand abruptly, and I followed his gaze to where the filth on the floor was shifting, oozing blobs rolling into others and then falling apart. It looked as though it was trying to form a pattern, writing even, but nothing came of it.

The usual adrenaline rush kicked in, the fight-or-flight demanding to know why I wasn’t running already. That was when Ms Levinger came to the doorway.

“What the hell are you doing?” she demanded.

Walther waved at me urgently, and I said, with a weak smile, “We’re investigating. Our way. If you’d-“

“I talked to the solicitors, like you wanted. They said that it was too late for us to complain about how long it took. And they said it was only when the body actually turned up that they could sort it out so it wasn’t their fault.”

I felt Walther twitch.

“The body?” I asked.

“Mr Wentworth’s body. They got it out of the river, apparently. They knew it was him from the teeth. So suicide, yes.”

“In the
river?
” Walther hissed, concentration broken. “I didn’t find- it can’t have made the papers… Then why… a suicide’s manifestation is usually at the place of suicide. I’d thought.” He frowned back at Ms. Levinger. “Unless it’s the sewage pipes going out… unless he made his way back- all the way from the river-“

“He’d have to get into the septic tank then. That’s where those pipes have to go,” Ms. Levinger said.

Walther stared at her. “Tank…?”

“Out back, in the garden.” Oblivious to his alarm she said. “It was from whatever was here before the bungalow. It’s bad for a modern house, but I got twenty thou’ off the price because of it so… What?”

“This is getting messy. I think we should-“ Walther said, and then the door slammed shut, cutting off Ms. Levinger and the outside world.

“What is it?” I asked Walther.

“Open the door,” he said urgently.

“But the circle-“

“Damn the circle. Open the door.”

I got my hand on the handle, but the door was stuck. I could feel it pulling but there was a pressure keeping it shut. For a moment I thought it was Ms. Levinger, that she had been behind it all somehow, but then I saw something glisten in a line between door and frame, the sickly slime forming a pressure seal that was strong enough that even I, and I’m no small man, could not get the thing open.

“Walther-“

“I’ve miscalculated, Michael.” There was something raw in his voice, and I turned at it, followed his gaze again.

It came out of the pipes, a thick, black stinking ooze. It was vomited onto the floor in surges, and where it hit, it did not simply pool, but became something, a shape.

It gouted out a hand, made all of slime, as though there was an invisible mould there, holding it in place - except that even as the hand was there it was moving, the fingers pulling at the stained floor. In the next moment there was another, heaved into existence by another slopping rush of thick jelly. They were both crawling forwards, fumbling at the linoleum, and the jelly that was running out of the pipes was still building with shocking swiftness, arms, shoulders, back and neck. I put all my weight to the door and heard the woodwork creak, but it would not budge. It was glued in place by the same poisonous stuff that was mounting up in the room’s corner. I could hear Ms. Levinger’s demanding voice from beyond.

I looked back. The sluggish, flowing thing was forming to the waist. I saw, then, where we had gone wrong.

“She didn’t leave him,” Walther got out. “He didn’t kill himself because she left him. He killed himself because he couldn’t get rid of her. Oh dear lord.”

The shape that was pouring out was a woman’s, and she was crawling towards us even as the slime built her. Her face was still turned down and, of all the things in the world, I did not want to see it. Joseph Wentworth’s dead wife - his supposedly missing but really- what? The wife he must have murdered, disposed of unspeakably, was regurgitating herself here, shuddering with rippling animation. It was a dead woman made of a million million living things that thrived and decayed to make her substance.

“Towels, Michael!” Walther said, and I grabbed two without thinking. He ripped them from my hands. 

The tank, I thought. The septic tank. I would not want to be the one to empty that. No doubt Mrs Wentworth’s remains were still there, but what she must have done to the three plumbers, to
drag them into the pipes
…

“If I’d known it was a murder I’d have had the heavy kit,” Walther muttered. The thing surged forwards another foot, the slime filling out hips, thighs. It was propping itself up on its glistening arms now, the head lifting. Numbly I heard Walther saying, “Because of course she didn’t
get
him. She didn’t get her revenge, and so we’re
all
Joseph Wentworth, to her. So stupid, so stupid.”

The thing from the pipes lifted its head and I saw its face. Probably I should have screamed but in fact I just shouted out “Oh fuck!” and recoiled against the irretrievably jammed door.

“Get behind me, Michael!” Walther said, but by that time I already was. The eyes were the worst. They were sucking holes. The mouth was the same, perfectly round and gurgling like a drain. There were no other features.

Walther interposed himself. He was…

He was wearing a towel around his waist, and his trousers were about his ankles. He had another towel on his head, folded up and back as though he had just washed his hair. He was standing very oddly, weight on one hip, head tilted to one side. He was never the most manly of men, by anyone’s standards, but right now he was flat-out camp. He was hamming it up like some pantomime dame.

“Oldest trick in the book,” he said, without look round at me. He was looking the thing in its horrible face, and not flinching. “Older than books, in fact. You can do a lot of fooling the invisible world, if you just play a bit of dress-up.”

“Are you… supposed to be in drag?” I got out. I had my eyes fixed on his back. I had seen enough of the late Mrs Wentworth.

“Well, dearie, give me better tools and you’d be amazed, but this is the best I can manage for now.”

“But...”

“Quiet.”

The thing was standing now, swaying, its substance quivering as it was impossibly held in place. I could not watch. The stench of it was choking me. I fixed my eyes on Walther’s back, hearing that ghastly sucking sound that her face was making.

It had reached out a hand that was black and gleamed wet in the light. Walther held himself very still, like a man watching a rearing snake.

I heard a noise. It was a gurgling, thick sound, but somewhere in there was human despair, and out of that sound the creature was suddenly no longer holding itself together. With a tremendous slap the gallons of slime hit the bathroom floor, and then they were being drawn back into the pipes again with incredible speed, so I expected to see the plastic bulge and split with it. Walther and I did not move until all that was left was the familiar slick of muck on the bathroom floor. After that I tried the door, which opened after a little sticky resistance. White-faced Ms. Levinger stared at me, and then at the apparition of Walther in his grotesque drag.

“I can’t help you,” he explained to her later, when he had a chance to re-dress and to wipe off Ms. Levinger’s lipstick, which he had also slapped on very inexpertly. “For very specific reasons that have nothing to do with my skills, it is simply not possible for me to deal with this.”

“Then what am I supposed to do?” Ms. Levinger demanded. I could see her point. Walther had come into her life and turned a moderate problem into a serious supernatural horror, and now he was leaving her with it.

In answer Walther opened his wallet and found a card. “This is one of my competitors,” he explained. 

“Wiccan Consultant…?” she said blankly.

“She dabbles in my field,” Walther explained. “For the purposes of this case, though, she has one crucial attribute that I lack. Call her. You may find that she has something of a waiting list. She seems to get all over the world being pagan.”

“But...”

Walther held up a hand. “Michael knows some people who are good at making unattended vehicles disappear. As part of our service, I think we can dispose of the vans for you. Otherwise questions might be asked. Beyond that, your immediate problem should solve itself very simply if you just call a female plumber. I understand there are several around these days. Call a female plumber and make sure she doesn’t use any male subcontractor. That will put your bathroom back in action.” He saw, and in fact I saw, something in her face that suggested that once this was done, she would let the rest go.

“No men in the house, Ms. Levinger,” he warned. “If this is not dealt with, this house will never be safe.”

From her expression she did not necessarily consider this a bad thing. Whether she did ever have the ghost laid to rest, after she had restored her bathroom to its pristine glory, I never found out.

THE LOST FAMILY

(A new story from the world of “The Fall of Hades”)

by

JEFFREY THOMAS

“Please be careful not to dislodge me, madam,” Jay said, riding across the woman’s back. “If I fall from this distance I’ll surely break.”

     Vee paused in her climb to glance downward, into the shaft through which she ascended. They had entered the vertical service shaft through an access hatch on Level 119, but the shaft ran deeper than that. Maybe all the way to the basement?

     “Even if you didn’t break, Jay, sorry but I don’t think I’d go down there after you.”

     “Understood,” Jay said drily. “All the more reason for caution, if you will.”

     The Angel named Vee had heard there was a settlement called Freetown on the 128
^th
floor of the Construct. A large colony where the Damned lived cooperatively alongside Angels, and even Demons – though not all races of Demon, surely, for she had just barely escaped a pack of small, skull-faced Demons several levels below her present position.

     She had learned of Freetown from Jay, her only companion in her exploration of the Construct. Only recently had she awakened from centuries as a catatonic prisoner of war, many levels below in the bowels of the Construct, without any memory of her past either as a mortal woman or, after her death, as an Angel. Nor did she remember the infernal war she herself had apparently participated in – the Armageddon that had left the last remaining Damned, Angels and Demons sheltering inside the impossibly vast structure called the Construct, with the shattered remnants of Hell outside its walls buried under solidified lava.