Weird Detectives (31 page)

A few moments later Pilbeam stood in the street, an inspiringly heavy purse in his hand, allowing himself a sigh of relief—ah, the free air was sweet, all was well that ended well . . . Martin stepped into a puddle, splashing the rank brew of rainwater and sewage onto the hem of Pilbeam’s robe.

Pilbeam availed himself yet again of Martin’s convenient handle. “You rank pottle-deep measle! You rude-growing toad!” he exclaimed, and guided the lad down the street toward the warmth and peace of home.

Lillian Stewart Carl
(www.lillianstewartcarl.com) is the author of numerous mystery and fantasy novels and short stories, all available in electronic and paper form.
The Mortsafe
, sixth and most recent of the Alasdair Cameron/Jean Fairbairn series, takes place in mysterious underground Edinburgh. Of
The Blue Hackle
, fifth in the series,
Publishers Weekly
said, in “ . . . Carl’s spirited fifth mystery featuring American travel journalist Jean Fairbairn and her Scottish fiancé, retired detective inspector Alasdair Cameron . . . [a] ghostly ancestress . . . interacts with Jean and [a visiting American antique dealer’s] young daughter, Dakota, to diverting effect.”

The Case:
A haunted woods, an eerie tree, a shadowy threat, malevolent strangeness . . .

The Investigator:
Dana Roberts, a detective of the supernormal. Now famous for her work with the supernatural (although she does not consider what she does as dealing with the supernatural), this was her first “case.”

THE CASE OF THE STALKING SHADOW

Joe R. Lansdale

I’ve mentioned Dana Roberts before, though with less kindness than I do now, and if anyone would have told me that I would be defending, even supporting, someone who in layman’s terms might be known as a ghost breaker, or a dealer in the supernatural, I would have laughed them out of the room.

It should also be noted that Dana does not consider what she does as dealing with the supernatural, which she believes is a term that often assigns some sort of religious aspect to her work. She believes what others call the supernatural is an unknown reality of this world, or some dimensional crossover that has yet to be explained, and if it were truly understood would be designated as science.

But here I go trying to explain her books, which after her first visit to our club I have read extensively. That said, I should also note that my conclusions about her observations, her work, might be erroneous. I’m a reader not a scholar, and above all, I love a good story.

The first time she was with us, she told us of an adventure she called
The Case of the Lighthouse Shambler
. At the end of her tale, or her report, if you take it as fact—and I do—she showed us something trapped in a mirror’s reflection that was in my view impossible to explain away. She was also missing the tip of her right index finger, which went along nicely with the story she had just finished.

Her visit to our club was, without a doubt, a highlight.

Though I suppose I’ve gotten a little out of order, I should pause and tell you something about our group. It now stands at twelve—three women and nine men. Most of us are middle age or better. I should also mention that during our last meeting I recorded Dana’s first story for our gathering, unbeknownst to her. My intent was to do so, and then replay parts of it to our treasurer, Kevin, with the intent of obvious ridicule and a declaration that dues spent on spook hunters as guests was money wasted.

Instead, I was so captivated with Dana’s story that I went home forgetting I had recorded her. Of course, Kevin had heard it all firsthand and had been as captivated with her adventure as I was.

A few weeks later I was finally brave enough to call Dana’s business, which is registered simply, Dana Roberts, Supernormal Investigations, and tell her what I had done. There was no need for it, as she would never know, but I harbored a certain amount of guilt, and liked the idea of having contact with her. I encouraged her to come to the club again.

To my relief, she found my original skepticism more than acceptable, and asked if I might like to transcribe my recording for publication in her monthly newsletter. I not only agreed, but it appeared in the April online magazine,
Dana Roberts Reports.
And so, here is another story, recorded and transcribed with her enthusiastic permission.

The night she came to us as a speaker, she was elegantly dressed, and looked fine in dark slacks and an ivory blouse. Her blond hair was combed back and tied loosely at her neck, and she wore her usual disarming smile.

She took her place in the large and comfortable guest chair, and with a tall drink in her hand, the lights dimmed, a fire crackling in the fireplace, she began to tell a story she called
The Case of The Stalking Shadow
.

It follows.

Since most of the events of the last few months have turned out to be hoaxes or of little interest, and because I am your invited guest, I decided tonight to fall back on one of my earlier cases—my first in fact—and the one that led me into this profession. Though at the time I didn’t know I was going to become a serious investigator of this sort of thing, or that it would require so much work, as well as putting myself continually in the face of danger. I’ve done more research for my current job than I ever did gaining my PhD in anthropology. Mistakes in what I do can have dire consequences, so it’s best to know what one is doing, at least where it can be known.

I was not paid for this investigation. It was done for myself, with the aid of a friend, and it happened when I was still in college. In the process of discovering my lifelong occupation, I nearly lost my life on more than one occasion, for there were several touchy moments. Had this particular case gone wrong, I would not be here today to entertain you with my adventures, nor would my friend and cousin Jane be alive.

Simply put, I come from what must be defined as a wealthy family. There were times when there was less wealth, but there was always money. This was also true of my close relatives, and so it was that my Aunt Elizabeth, on my father’s side, invited us each year to her home for the summer. It was a kid event, and children of both my mother and father’s siblings were gathered each year when school let out to spend a week with Aunt Elizabeth, whose husband was in oil, and often gone for months at a time. I suppose, having no children of her own, she liked the company, and in later years when her husband—my then Uncle Chester—ran off with a woman from Brazil, it became more clear to me why she looked forward each year to a family gathering, and why she surrounded herself with so many other activities, and spent Uncle Chester’s money with a kind of abandon that could only speak to the idea of getting hers while there was something to be got.

But that is all sour family business, and I will pass over it. I’m sure I’ve told too much already.

The year I’m talking about, when I was thirteen, my Aunt and Uncle had moved from their smaller property upstate and had bought what could only be described as a classic estate, made to look very much like those huge British properties we see frequently in older movies and television programs. It was in America, in the Deep South, but it certainly had the looks of a traditional upper-level British residence, with enormous acreage to match. In the latter respect, it was more common to America’s vast spaces. One hundred acres, the largest portion of it wooded, with a house that had no fewer than forty-five rooms, and a surrounding area dotted with gardens and shrubs trimmed in the shape of animals: lions and tigers and bears.

It was overdone and overblown. For a child, those vast rooms and that enormous acreage were a kind of paradise. Or so it seemed at the time of that initial gathering of my cousins and myself.

After arrival, and a few days of getting to know one another—for in some cases our lives were so different, and things had changed so dramatically for each of us in such a short period of time—it was necessary to reacquaint. We were on the verge of leaving childhood, or most of us were, though some of us were younger. For me, this year was to be particularly important, and in many ways the last year of what I think of as true childhood. Certainly, I was not grown after this year passed, but my interests began to move in other directions. Boys and cars and dating, the whole nine yards. And, of course, what happened changed me forever.

But this summer I’m talking about, we spent a vast amount of time playing the old childhood games. It was a wonderful and leisurely existence that consisted of swimming in the pool, croquet, badminton, and the like. At night, since my aunt would not allow television, we played board games of all varieties, and as there were a huge number of us cousins, we were often pitted against one another in different parts of the house with different games.

One night, perhaps three days into my visit, my cousin Jane and I found ourselves alone in a large room where we were playing chess, and between moves she suddenly asked, without really waiting for a reply: “Have you been in the woods behind the estate? I find it quite queer.”

“Queer?” I said.

“Strange. I suppose it’s my imagination, being a city girl, I’m not used to the proximity of so many trees.”

I didn’t know it at the time, and would probably not have appreciated it, but those trees had been there for hundreds of years. And though other areas had been logged out and replaced with “crops” of pines in long rows, this was the remains of the aboriginal forests.

Jumping ahead slightly—the trees were not only of a younger time, but they were huge, and they grew in such a way the limbs had grown together and formed a kind of canopy that didn’t allow brush and vines to grow beneath them. So when someone says there are as many trees now as there once were, you can be certain they are describing crop trees, grown close together without the variance of nature. These trees were from a time when forests were forests, so to speak.

Anyway, she said perhaps a few more words about the trees, and how she thought the whole place was odd, but I didn’t pay any real attention to her—and there was nothing in her manner that I determined to be dread or worry of any kind. So, her comments didn’t really have impact on me, and it wasn’t until later that I thought back on our conversation and realized how accurately impressionable Jane had been.

There was something strange about those woods.

After another day or so, the pool and the nighttime games lost some of their appeal. We did some night swimming, lounging around the pool; but one moonlit night one of the younger children among us—Billy, who was ten— suggested that it might be fun to play a game of tag in the woods.

Now, from an adult standpoint this seems like a bad choice, mucking about in the woods at night. But we were young and it was a very bright night, and it seemed like a wonderful idea.

We decided a game would be delicious. We chose up teams. One team constituted eight cousins, the other seven. The game was somewhere between hide-and-go-seek and tag. One team would hide, the other would seek. The trick was to chase down the hiding team and tag them, making them a member of the hunting team. In time, the idea was to tag everyone into the chasing team, and then the game would switch out.

How we started was, the chasing team was to stay at the swimming pool while the hiding team had a fifteen minute head start into the woods. It was suggested that the more open part of the woods was to be our area, but that no one should go into the thicker and darker part, because that was a lot of acreage and more difficult.

At the signal, we shot off like quail, splitting up in the woods to hide, each of us going our own route.

I went through the trees, and proceeded immediately to the back of the sparser woods and came to the edge where it thickened. The trees in the sparser area were of common variety, but of uneven shape. They didn’t grow high, but were thickly festooned with sickly widespread branches, and beneath them were plenty of shadows.

As if it were yesterday, I remember that as soon as I came to that section of trees, I was besieged by an unreasonable sensation of discomfort. The discomfort, at this point, wasn’t fear—it was more a malaise that had descended on me heavy as a wool blanket. I thought it had to do with my overextending myself while on vacation, because I was used to a much more controlled environment and an earlier bedtime.

The trees seemed far more shadowy than they had appeared from a distance, and I had the impression of being watched. No, that isn’t quite right. Not of being watched so much as of a presence in the general locale. Something so close, that I should be able to see it, but couldn’t.

I marked this down to exhaustion, and went about finding a good place to hide. I could hear the seekers beginning to run toward the woods, and then I heard someone scream, having been tagged immediately. I chose a place between two trees that had grown together high and low in such a way as to appear to be a huge letter H placed on a pedestal; the trees met in such tight formation they provided a near singular trunk and the bar of the H was an intermingled branch of both trees. I darted behind them, scooted down, and put my back against the trunk.

No sooner had I chosen my spot than it occurred to me that its unusual nature might in fact attract one of the seekers. But by then, I felt it was too late and pressed my back against the tree, awaiting whatever fate might come.

From where I sat, I could see the deeper woods, and I had an urge to run to them, away from the grove of trees where I now hid. I also disliked the idea of having my back against the tree and being discovered suddenly and frightened by the hunters. I didn’t want that surprise to cause me to squeal the way I had heard someone squeal earlier. I liked to think of myself as too mature for a child’s game to begin with, and was beginning to regret my involvement in the matter.