When I saw the name of the boy who’d written the story, I knew there’d be another story scooched up inside of it, like the eel Old Man Cody slit open under the noses of the girls who’d come to cast a wreath for their missing classmate.
COMEDIC JUSTICE
by
Joshua Carnby
A movie manuscript, they called it. That was a first, though we’ve had most everything you’d care to name in here and some you wouldn’t. A few of the more unmentionable have made their way over to Mallum Colt after a time. Or back to Mallum, even. And while we aren’t in the habit of displaying our exhibits in nigh-as-darnit-just-too-murky jars, let’s say that Colt’s little cabinet of curiosities and mine have kept each other in business over the years.
But I had better make my introductions, before you go thinking I’m the Sheriff himself or even one of the regular Deputies. Baldassar Lowell is my name. I am (and have been for many years) Supervisor of the Property Unit, which is a fancy way of saying evidence room, which is what we should say, but never do, instead of ‘dungeon’. Like any dungeon-keeper, I’m rarely allowed above the lower levels and that suits me fine. But this time Sheriff Hamilton had me dust off my weapon and badge on account of how he’d sent the other deputy to check on fishing permits, PDQ.
“Baldassar,” he told me. “You know I wouldn’t be asking, but if I let Lopez handle this, won’t be a five-oh-three but a one-eight-seven.”
“Janet is an activist,” I agreed.
“That she is.”
So that’s how I came to play my part in the story, the one that was twisted like wrung washing inside the other, rank as that scummy puddle on the pierhead. And in case you’re wondering: five-oh-three, auto theft; one-eight-seven, murder.
The automobile-in-question was a Japanese gadget, a Hybrid, which we hadn’t seen in Shallow Creek before (least not of the automotive variety). It had been driven through the mountains that morning, not by the gentleman-in-question, the one Deputy Lopez would have got all activated about, but by his chauffeur/minder, a thick-necked if trim-waisted individual who looked like he could put the little liftback in his pocket as easy as park it. The G-i-Q rode upfront alongside him and the two women sat in back. One of these was his PA, so he said, and the other, well, take your pick. His protégé, he called her (truth to tell, I thought he said Prodigy). You might make up your own mind soon enough.
The reason these fine Outsiders had come to town had to do with Comedic Justice and its writer. They were Movie People, from Across There. And the reason they came into my story had to do with Comedic Justice too. Soon after pitching up, they’d blipped the Hybrid by the old fairground and returned moments later to find it gone, including said manuscript. That bullnecked bodyguard would have done better slipping it into his Black Ops pants after all.
By the time they’d followed directions to the Department they were all of them talking, Fast and Loud. Sheriff Hamilton heard them coming and had Stacey buzz them through. At that stage I was only out of the dungeon by chance, fixing coffee, but straightaway I saw the cloud cross Janet’s features as she noted how the bigwig treated the others. She has a nose for a two-seven-three-D; always did.
First thing they wanted to talk about is what every visitor to Shallow Creek wants to talk about and no, I don’t mean the Asylum, nor the Disappearances, nor the Incident...
“Can’t get a signal!” complains the PA, with the ritual Waving of the Phones.
“Nope,” croaks I from the galley, playing my part. “’tis the hills, an’ the sea mist, some.”
And Big JT, puffing out that chest with the star and the toothpaste stains on it, cracking open a welcoming smile.
“What seems to be the trouble, folks?”
“Sheriff – Hamilton?” the PA squinted at his other badge through funny eyeglasses that had one side white, the other black. “This is FF Almenar, the famous Producer?”
The more the entourage stood up to him, the more JT settled his ass on the corner of Stacey’s desk, his easy smile still level with their faces.
“What’s the F stand for?”
“Which one?”
“Oh,” JT gave it his best drawl. “Either. Neither.”
That stumped her, for a moment, till the G-i-Q himself raised two inflated-looking hands and shifted her out of the way like something on casters.
“FF – Fast Forward Productions? We’re here to scout locations for a movie we’re developing, and to meet the young man who came up with it. Local man - Joshua Carnby?”
JT never even flinched.
“Believe you’ve had some trouble with your car?”
But old FF wasn’t rising neither.
“You could say that...”
So that’s how it started. And when JT had calmed them down and sent them to try the spider crabs at the Brooke Hotel – and sent Janet in the opposite direction – he turned to me, fresh-oiled sidearm, shiny badge and all.
“Happened by the old fairground. Go see where Mikey Pollock’s at today.”
“What d’you reckon to FF,” I prompted. “Fat – Fella - ain’t he?”
“That he is.”
“And the Carnby boy? What’s that about?”
Nary a bite. Some days there just ain’t.
“Go find Mikey, Baldassar. If it wasn’t him he knows who. If it was, reckon Barney Sylvester saw him right after. Make Sly’s your second port of call.”
I locked up the dungeon (it’s a code, not a key) and tipped my old bones into Janet’s cruiser, elbowing aside a tsunami of Styrofoam. Why is it women can be on your case night and day about every spot or scratch around the house and still treat the inside of their cars like dumpsters? Everything in its place, that’s my motto.
You’d need a fifty-year-old map to find the old fairground, but it’s still there, tucked away behind Davy Jones’ Lockups and the port. Some of the rides got left when it closed, with the Scare and all, but most of it has been torched over the years and left to rot or rust. It seemed a funny place to leave your car, by that trampled-down mesh fence, with only the laughter of the gulls and the rigs of the shrimp boats in the mist beyond, but of course I hadn’t read Carnby’s story then, nor remembered how, as a younger man, I used to peer at what remained of the fancy hoardings, trying to make out a white-painted face.
No sign of Mary Pollock’s boy, excepting a pile of stubs and shards of blackened glass. Plus a moister patch at the curbside that might have been piss or oil or blood. This was still a five-oh-three not a one-eight-seven and I didn’t want to know.
Instead I battled Janet’s trash again and crawled through town, checking faces. The usual suspects, I suppose, and none behaving all that strange, for these parts – though I drew a couple of stares for being in Janet’s cruiser, and in shades. Even with the brume rolling up the streets from the Creek, us dungeon-dwellers are unaccustomed to the light.
As I went I found myself re-checking other faces too. FF’s: slick as a slime-eel, with a Cheshire grin that seemed directed entirely at himself. The PA’s and the bodyguard’s: faithful but worn round the edges and desperate to please. And the Prodigy’s: browbeaten like the others, but distant too and disengaged. Other Ds came to mind, including Janet’s two-seven-three: felony domestic. But another was dreamy, dreaming. Plus she looked like Audrey Hepburn and I mean exactly.
Perhaps I was dreaming too.
A black-sailed barge was headed out, laden to the gunnels, and I had to wait an age for the road to grind back into place. Masked figures gathered round a vat on deck. The thing moved in a cloud of mist all its own.
Across the Creek I took the road up through Silverpine Forest to the lumber mill, my nine to five for more than twenty years, before the fire. Then I swung the car towards the sea again and made for the Pitchfork, which is a grand name for the always-damp-and-gloomy three-ways where you turn back down to the bay or go straight along the tunnel of trees to Arkady Asylum.
Me, I took the third fork, heading north out of town to where an iron giant, rising above the treeline, had snatched mismatched neon letters in his upraised hand:
SLY’S SALVAGE
Then all at once I was on the brakes and sliding sideways on the slippery blacktop. There, right in the middle of the road, I saw a body.
The giant’s red eyes fixed me as I shook myself out of the cruiser, one hand on my hip, the other tugging at the mike lead like a gun-shy pup. Thankfully I came to my senses before hollering for backup.
What had looked like a human body sprawled across the yellow line was actually a collection of expensive suitcases draped with even more expensive coats. On the top, what I’d took for the white blur of a face was the brass-bound manuscript.
I confess I cussed a while before I called it in. Comedic Justice indeed.
“Looks like they jettisoned anything incriminating before turning into Sly’s,” I told JT. “And I mean just before – we ain’t talking master criminals.”
“No, we’re talking Barney or Ted Sylvester, and Mikey Pollock being opportunistic. But that car will be in bits already and the prime cuts on a boat by tonight.”
“Least they got their story back,” I said.
“Least they do. OK, good work, Deputy Lowell. Drop in at Sly’s, go through the motions, then bring their stuff back here. I’ll call and give them the good news.”
“Ten-four.”
He knew I didn’t need backup now. He knew I knew Ted and Barney well enough and Mary Pollock too, and her waste of air of a son. And he knew what I knew they knew, which was that it would take the whole FBI a whole week to search that yard – and not even FF Almenar the Famous Producer was as important as that.
But I’m not sure he’d thought it through like me, nor seen how FF and his entourage weren’t going to like it. Regardless of how the investigation might be conducted, those coats and cases, that manuscript, were evidence now.
Everything in its place.
##########################################
Down in the dungeon you can hardly hear the dying whale bellow of the lighthouse diaphone that invades people’s dreams like a guilty conscience on foggy nights.
Tonight it seemed the darkness had snuck down the vents with the fog. I had to slide the last page under the old green banker’s lamp.
...his face daubed in crude black and white makeup, the red-painted lips a bloody smear, the dead eyes rolled up into his skull.
FADE OUT.
THE END.
“Well fuck a duck,” I told myself, then looked around to make sure I really was alone.
The things in the cages gazed down on me - terrible secrets in the shadows.
But no white-painted face, no matter how hard I peered.
I flipped the manuscript again.
Joshua Carnby.
Another ghost.
In the world above, John Tracy Hamilton sat on the fringes of his own pool of light, a big, black predator waiting to pounce. Or another lost vessel, without even the hospital for a home harbour these past months. When he looked up it seemed to take him a moment to recognise me.
“Baldassar. Didn’t know you’d doubled shifts as well.”
“Hell, JT, you know the sandman never comes when that horn’s sounding.”
“That he don’t.”
He was skirting me too now, reluctant to bite. I tried to jiggle it closer to him:
“Hey, we should check out the CCTV when you told him he’d have to wait for his precious script back. Wiped that Fat Fella’s grin off his face, you did! Only...”
“What is it, Baldassar?”
“Well, once I’d dusted it – and no dice there - I kind of took a look at it. Because of the name. Funny way to tell a story, all INT this and V.O. that, but I got the swing of it.”
“And?”
“And it was sure enough writ by someone from Shallow Creek.”
“You ain’t telling me that Joshua Carnby has risen from the grave.”
“I’m telling you it’s got details I don’t know how it’s got. About that whole case.”
I could see from his face it was all just myth to him, same as it is to most folks nowadays. Before their time, it was. Before mine too, least my time at the Sheriff’s Department. I’d been a boy counting beans up at the sawmill when it broke – the case, the tragedy – like a winter squall. But happened it had and so I gave him the bones of it: of that God-darn breakfast cereal they brought to town and the character they created to sell it, the Clown, and the poor actor who played the Clown, and what was done to him when the children began to sicken. Some said it was on account of a mould that grew on the nuts, though there’d been talk of the chemical plant up river and an unacknowledged release.
JT was doing that thing with his fingers, that kind of blackjack shuffle I like to think signifies him organising the punch cards in his brain-box.
“Joshua Carnby was the actor, huh?”
“That’s right, JT, rest his soul. Little more than a sprat himself he was, when they done for him. But in the story, as the years go by, there are sightings of a spooky old clown trying to lure kids away from the carnival with tales of an even more magical place - a gingerbread palace. That’s why the entourage was parked down by the old fairground yesterday. And that ain’t all...”
JT grunted. He knew the next part, or thought he did. But it was going to have to be enough for now. The phones all rang at once and we both as near as shat.
“I asked Stacey to switch ’em all through to this one. Guess she did the opposite.” JT chuckled. Then his face froze hard again.
"Lowridge County Sheriff’s Department, Sheriff Hamilton speaking.”
I watched him listen, and uh-huh, and nod. When he set the phone down I watched him shake his head in something between wonder and its opposite. Seemed it wasn’t only Stacey getting ass-backwards lately.
“We’ll pick this up later, Baldassar. Get your piece strapped on. There’s been a disturbance at the Brooke Hotel.”
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Shallow Creek is a mighty peculiar place. It conforms to the law of the land, mostly, and the laws of nature, when it pleases, but the law of averages never seems to get a look in. By which I mean we’ve had our fair share of disturbances for a small town and then some. There were the Disappearances, which I believe I’ve mentioned, the tragedy at Devil’s Gorge, and that business at the Hanging Tree. There was the listing derelict that slid right up to the pier one foggy night like this – presumed vaporised forty years before at Bikini Atoll. That had the laws of physics on the run, as well as everybody else. So the disturbance that greeted us in the street outside the Brooke was strictly small fry for these parts.
JT has a heavier right foot than mine, plus I had to fend off Janet’s avalanche again, so by the time I pulled up what I saw was blue and amber deck lights through the fog. Then figures. Then faces. The faces looked shinier than they ought to have done. It was all the lights on all the sweat and tears.
Shiniest of all: the PA, shaking, distressed. JT was trying to calm her down. Next shiny: Muscles, pumped up in a sleeveless tee from pulling people apart. Then FF himself, in silky robe and slippers... well, carrying the weight he did, he’d probably be sweating just from all the shouting he’d been doing, which was mostly about who was fired and how he should have done it earlier, witnesses said. And then the Prodigy, with the tracks of tears, but looking numb and half froze in her nightwear. Later I couldn’t even recall giving her my jacket, but I did.
Over JT’s shoulder, the PA reminded FF he was a goodfornothing sack of shit and a Dirty Bastard Too.
FF had on that Cheshire grin again.
“And you just kissed your career goodbye, honey, on both coasts.”
“Better than kissing you, asshole!”
And so on. Seems she’d marched out of the hotel in the middle of the night in what she was wearing, which wasn’t much, and demanded Muscles drive her home in the car they hadn’t got. FF had made some attempt to throw her belongings after her and it had started up again in the street.
Being as we were stood there watching, I tried to play lawman with the Prodigy.
“Can you tell me what was the cause of the initial altercation, ma’am?”
I bet she could, but instead she threw a look to FF, who caught it and kind of spun it back. She found my cigarettes and lighter, lit one with an Audrey Hepburn half-smile and said nothing.
After that there wasn’t much we could do but usher everyone back inside and tell the PA where to hire a car in the morning. FF had a protective arm around the Prodigy’s shoulders as he mounted the main staircase, but then he rounded on us as we stood there and he roared:
“I want my script back!”
And as JT batted that one back and forth, I swear the Prodigy asked me, softly:
“Did you read it?”
And I swear too that I haven’t blushed or shook like that in fifty years, nor come up empty of words.
“Ma’am, I...”
“Goodnight, Deputy Lowell,” she said.
Outside, shrugging back into my jacket – and kind of feeling for her warmth, I admit, but finding nothing – I fired up a smoke of my own and offered one to JT.
“Outsiders,” I said, by way of not very much.
He spat.
“Something wrong about having employees you go about in robes with.”
“Something suspicious?”
He looked at me, then gave another ass-backwards head-shake.
“Something wrong.”
We were alone on the intersection. The fog was lifting and there was light in the sky, of sorts. Then that darned diaphone sounded again.
“About the manuscript, JT. About Edward Carnby...”
This time there was no confusion in the way he shook his head.
“Not now, Baldassar. Go home. Get some sleep. Something tells me tomorrow’s gonna be another busy one.”
##########################################
After what the good people of Shallow Creek did to the Clown, you might expect the son to have burned his father’s bloodstained costume and moved the hell away as soon as he was old enough. Edward Carnby did neither. To the horror of the townsfolk, Krinkles rose again.
By then the rumours of the chemical leak had gained some credence – enough to sow the seeds of doubt about what the mob had done. Kids who’d never tasted Krinkle Crunch joined their sweet-toothed classmates in the Lungs. Babies were born wrong, long after the cereal factory got levelled. It was whispered even Edward was touched, though he’d been but a suckling at the time. Later, people said his own offspring shared the affliction: one bound for a padded cell at Arkady, the other for a different institution far inland that specialised in congenital deformities.
So nobody quite knew what to do when the Clown was reborn, first as an act at Bubba’s Bazaar, then as a Children’s Entertainer. Whether through guilt or pity or that thing in between that Mallum calls Curiosity, we’d tolerate him at the circus or the carnival, though it wasn’t what you’d call a mirthful performance and that wheezing cackle got into your head every bit as much as the lighthouse diaphone. Once or twice people even booked him for parties, albeit of the Sophomoronic sort. Those didn’t go well. Course he was mostly always drunk by then.
JT nodded. We were back in the galley, chugging Java like our lives depended on it, which they probably did. Neither of us had slept.
“Busted him myself couple of times. Wasn’t his mom ever there to look out for him?”
“Reckon not. If she fed little Edward the poison through her tit she can’t have lasted long.” I saw his face and wished I’d bit my lip. “But hell, JT, it was over fifty years ago.”
“Meaning who knows what really happened?”
“Meaning someone knows.” I tapped on the script, which had flakes of JT’s Danish on it, like his shirtfront, and was most definitely not in its place.
“Ain’t our concern, Baldassar, least not till they make their movie and it brings the ghouls back to town. Matter of fact, I reached a decision last night on that score. Gonna give this back to them and close the case before the Mayor orders me.”
He’d laid a big hand on the script as he said it and before I knew it I’d done the same.
“Don’t mean we can’t find out what happened and who knows about it. Let me go down to the Chronicle and take a look though their archive...”
And that’s what I did. They know me there. I’ve even advised them on how to keep everything in its place, though that hasn’t yet stretched to microfilm, let alone this newfangled Online. I was deep in the damp, musty ’60s when my two-way squawked.
“Get your ass down to the old fairground. We got a possible one-eight-seven.”
I grabbed what I had and git.
If you were to ask me, I’d say I’d had my suspicions about the identity of the DRT - but that it wasn’t until I’d rocked up in Janet’s cruiser to find its real owner stepping back over the flattened wire in a Sheriff’s Department coat and an off-duty frock and a pair of God-Knows gumboots that they were confirmed. But really I’d known all along.
No mist today – instead that kind of salt-bleached sunlight that makes everything a blur, specially at my age. I followed Janet across acres of weeds and rubble, half-burned sleeping bags, mutilated fiberglass animals and the strange, faded-rainbow cobwebs of wind-torn nylon nets and lines. Whole place stank of shit and fish.
I could see where we were headed. The old Wave Swinger, its crown burned away and the arms at tortured angles. Some of the seats still hung lop-sided from their rusted chains. Most were gone.
At the hub, where the operator had stood, you could make out the ghosts of fantastic sea-creatures in gilded frames. Through the missing boards you could see the body.
Dead Right There, in the middle of this wasteland, where fun went bad and innocence was lost forever.
Everything in its place.
Sheriff Hamilton’s bulk was blocking the view.
“I called in Lopez,” he said. “Didn’t seem to matter anymore.”
“I don’t need to see it, JT. I’ve already seen it!”
He heard the fear in my voice and fixed me with a sudden glare.
“Hell do you mean by that?”
“In the story...” I tried to say - but even I could tell that made no sense.
“Baldassar, have you already been here? What have you seen?”
The face daubed in black and white... the red-painted lips a bloody smear...
“No. Nothing.” I said. I reached into my jacket for my cigarettes and found the fistful of newspaper cuttings instead.
“Deputy Lowell, this is your territory, so get a grip.” JT gestured toward FF Almenar the Famous Producer and soon-to-be-infamous corpse. I saw the empty can of boat paint next to him, and the tar. Suddenly I realised that the sheaf of papers in the Sheriff’s gloved hand wasn’t crime scene notes he was about to pass to me, it was the manuscript. “It’s been made to look like some crazy Clown killing, like in this story. So who could know about that?”
“His entourage...” I fumbled. “The PA, the bodyguard...”
“Both accounted for in Will Sanders’ car rental agency from the time FF left the hotel to when we picked them up.”
“The Prod... I mean his actress companion, Alexandra?”
“Miss Dyle is unaccounted for at present, but witnesses place her in the breakfast room at the Brooke until well after FF left. One of those witnesses is me, when I went looking for him to return this script. We don’t yet have a time of death but by the looks of him my guess is it will save us asking her any awkward questions.” JT pulled a sheepish face, as though practising. “Who else, Baldassar?”
“The family - but they’re all dead or accounted for. Joshua Carnby is in the ground. His wife too, we was just saying. Edward went overboard from Old Man Cody’s boat what, two year back? His poor son, Josh, has been jabbering baby-talk in Arkady Asylum for twenty years or more. And the other child, if they ever gave it a name, was shipped off to some scientific freakshow for being a monster. Their mother died in childbirth. Don’t see how it can be any of them.”
“Yet you said it yourself: someone knows what happened. Someone from Shallow Creek wrote that story. I’d say there’s a good chance FF arranged to meet him here.”
Janet cleared her throat.
“Maybe you could ask her.”
At the limits of my vision a lone figure was tippy-toeing over the fence. We intercepted her before she got too close.
“Is it him? Is it FF?” I guess that’s what shock looks like, on her. Dead-eyed, white-faced. I fancy I saw more blood drain from her cheeks and lips as she realised we weren’t saying anything to deny it.
“May I ask where you’ve been the last couple of hours, Miss Dyle?” That was JT. Watching her like I was – seeing her - I couldn’t hardly speak.
“Walking, down by the Creek. I had to clear my head. Something made me come this way. An intuition.” Gazing past us to where the part-time crime scene specialist and evidence technician from the hospital were hunkered down, she gave a shiver. “Then I spotted the - costumes.”
“Anybody see you along there by the Creek?”
“Yes, I think. There were people. There were always people.”
“Did you ever meet the person who wrote this?”
Her eyes went down to the manuscript without really seeing it.
“Joshua Carnby?” That faraway voice. She was full-on D for distant, dreamy, dreaming again.
“We know it wasn’t him.”
And then abruptly, but somehow slowly too, she was back with us. Almost.
“You think you know so much!”
“What don’t we know, Miss Dyle?”
And she met our eyes, person by person, JT’s, mine, before latching onto Janet’s.
“How it is, with men like that. They think because they’ve made you you’re just a thing...”
That’s when the tears came, and all the rest. JT told Janet to take her back to the office and get her settled in the galley.
He pulled a face.
“Thought she wasn’t going to go, there, for a minute.”
“They always go, JT,” I said. I knew now why he’d been so quick to recall Lopez.
“You had me worried you was gonna go first, as it happens.”
I spat, rubbed it in with my boot.
“Out of practice, I guess.”
“Guess we all were,” he growled and went off to talk to the others.
I squinted back towards the figures at the fence – just two light-dark flickers now.
I pulled the cuttings from my jacket pocket. The top one, with the picture of the Clown, had the headline: LOCAL ENTERTAINER LYNCHED.
The one underneath was a background piece on him and his new wife and their baby boy. There was a grainy photograph, much enlarged, that showed them being introduced to the Mayor at the grand opening of the Krinkle Crunch factory. He looked so young and fresh and full of hope and promise.
So did his wife. And of course she looked exactly like Audrey Hepburn.
With a kind of gulp that JT would have said was me going, I scrunched up the cuttings and thrust them back inside my pocket. It wouldn’t do him any good to see them. He wouldn’t understand.
He wouldn’t understand about who lures who these days, and how, and why, and what goes on in that gingerbread palace of theirs. Or that it could have been the family, but maybe not – because there are other people who know what happened and they’re the people who cornered Joshua Carnby that day, right here on this very spot. They have to live with this and see it over and over and maybe that’s the point.
The dead eyes rolled up into his skull...
Off by the fence, the women had vanished. Now it was only the gulls swooping, circling, cackling. Sometimes I think they’ll never stop.
Or maybe it’s like getting lost in the woods. You wind up spooking yourself and that’s what sends you deeper into trouble. Maybe, for all its mysteries, this place is nothing but the woods - and it’s what you bring to Shallow Creek of your own free will that turns around and gets you in the end.
Maybe.
© Paul Phillips
COMEDIC JUSTICE
by
Joshua Carnby
A movie manuscript, they called it. That was a first, though we’ve had most everything you’d care to name in here and some you wouldn’t. A few of the more unmentionable have made their way over to Mallum Colt after a time. Or back to Mallum, even. And while we aren’t in the habit of displaying our exhibits in nigh-as-darnit-just-too-murky jars, let’s say that Colt’s little cabinet of curiosities and mine have kept each other in business over the years.
But I had better make my introductions, before you go thinking I’m the Sheriff himself or even one of the regular Deputies. Baldassar Lowell is my name. I am (and have been for many years) Supervisor of the Property Unit, which is a fancy way of saying evidence room, which is what we should say, but never do, instead of ‘dungeon’. Like any dungeon-keeper, I’m rarely allowed above the lower levels and that suits me fine. But this time Sheriff Hamilton had me dust off my weapon and badge on account of how he’d sent the other deputy to check on fishing permits, PDQ.
“Baldassar,” he told me. “You know I wouldn’t be asking, but if I let Lopez handle this, won’t be a five-oh-three but a one-eight-seven.”
“Janet is an activist,” I agreed.
“That she is.”
So that’s how I came to play my part in the story, the one that was twisted like wrung washing inside the other, rank as that scummy puddle on the pierhead. And in case you’re wondering: five-oh-three, auto theft; one-eight-seven, murder.
The automobile-in-question was a Japanese gadget, a Hybrid, which we hadn’t seen in Shallow Creek before (least not of the automotive variety). It had been driven through the mountains that morning, not by the gentleman-in-question, the one Deputy Lopez would have got all activated about, but by his chauffeur/minder, a thick-necked if trim-waisted individual who looked like he could put the little liftback in his pocket as easy as park it. The G-i-Q rode upfront alongside him and the two women sat in back. One of these was his PA, so he said, and the other, well, take your pick. His protégé, he called her (truth to tell, I thought he said Prodigy). You might make up your own mind soon enough.
The reason these fine Outsiders had come to town had to do with Comedic Justice and its writer. They were Movie People, from Across There. And the reason they came into my story had to do with Comedic Justice too. Soon after pitching up, they’d blipped the Hybrid by the old fairground and returned moments later to find it gone, including said manuscript. That bullnecked bodyguard would have done better slipping it into his Black Ops pants after all.
By the time they’d followed directions to the Department they were all of them talking, Fast and Loud. Sheriff Hamilton heard them coming and had Stacey buzz them through. At that stage I was only out of the dungeon by chance, fixing coffee, but straightaway I saw the cloud cross Janet’s features as she noted how the bigwig treated the others. She has a nose for a two-seven-three-D; always did.
First thing they wanted to talk about is what every visitor to Shallow Creek wants to talk about and no, I don’t mean the Asylum, nor the Disappearances, nor the Incident...
“Can’t get a signal!” complains the PA, with the ritual Waving of the Phones.
“Nope,” croaks I from the galley, playing my part. “’tis the hills, an’ the sea mist, some.”
And Big JT, puffing out that chest with the star and the toothpaste stains on it, cracking open a welcoming smile.
“What seems to be the trouble, folks?”
“Sheriff – Hamilton?” the PA squinted at his other badge through funny eyeglasses that had one side white, the other black. “This is FF Almenar, the famous Producer?”
The more the entourage stood up to him, the more JT settled his ass on the corner of Stacey’s desk, his easy smile still level with their faces.
“What’s the F stand for?”
“Which one?”
“Oh,” JT gave it his best drawl. “Either. Neither.”
That stumped her, for a moment, till the G-i-Q himself raised two inflated-looking hands and shifted her out of the way like something on casters.
“FF – Fast Forward Productions? We’re here to scout locations for a movie we’re developing, and to meet the young man who came up with it. Local man - Joshua Carnby?”
JT never even flinched.
“Believe you’ve had some trouble with your car?”
But old FF wasn’t rising neither.
“You could say that...”
So that’s how it started. And when JT had calmed them down and sent them to try the spider crabs at the Brooke Hotel – and sent Janet in the opposite direction – he turned to me, fresh-oiled sidearm, shiny badge and all.
“Happened by the old fairground. Go see where Mikey Pollock’s at today.”
“What d’you reckon to FF,” I prompted. “Fat – Fella - ain’t he?”
“That he is.”
“And the Carnby boy? What’s that about?”
Nary a bite. Some days there just ain’t.
“Go find Mikey, Baldassar. If it wasn’t him he knows who. If it was, reckon Barney Sylvester saw him right after. Make Sly’s your second port of call.”
I locked up the dungeon (it’s a code, not a key) and tipped my old bones into Janet’s cruiser, elbowing aside a tsunami of Styrofoam. Why is it women can be on your case night and day about every spot or scratch around the house and still treat the inside of their cars like dumpsters? Everything in its place, that’s my motto.
You’d need a fifty-year-old map to find the old fairground, but it’s still there, tucked away behind Davy Jones’ Lockups and the port. Some of the rides got left when it closed, with the Scare and all, but most of it has been torched over the years and left to rot or rust. It seemed a funny place to leave your car, by that trampled-down mesh fence, with only the laughter of the gulls and the rigs of the shrimp boats in the mist beyond, but of course I hadn’t read Carnby’s story then, nor remembered how, as a younger man, I used to peer at what remained of the fancy hoardings, trying to make out a white-painted face.
No sign of Mary Pollock’s boy, excepting a pile of stubs and shards of blackened glass. Plus a moister patch at the curbside that might have been piss or oil or blood. This was still a five-oh-three not a one-eight-seven and I didn’t want to know.
Instead I battled Janet’s trash again and crawled through town, checking faces. The usual suspects, I suppose, and none behaving all that strange, for these parts – though I drew a couple of stares for being in Janet’s cruiser, and in shades. Even with the brume rolling up the streets from the Creek, us dungeon-dwellers are unaccustomed to the light.
As I went I found myself re-checking other faces too. FF’s: slick as a slime-eel, with a Cheshire grin that seemed directed entirely at himself. The PA’s and the bodyguard’s: faithful but worn round the edges and desperate to please. And the Prodigy’s: browbeaten like the others, but distant too and disengaged. Other Ds came to mind, including Janet’s two-seven-three: felony domestic. But another was dreamy, dreaming. Plus she looked like Audrey Hepburn and I mean exactly.
Perhaps I was dreaming too.
A black-sailed barge was headed out, laden to the gunnels, and I had to wait an age for the road to grind back into place. Masked figures gathered round a vat on deck. The thing moved in a cloud of mist all its own.
Across the Creek I took the road up through Silverpine Forest to the lumber mill, my nine to five for more than twenty years, before the fire. Then I swung the car towards the sea again and made for the Pitchfork, which is a grand name for the always-damp-and-gloomy three-ways where you turn back down to the bay or go straight along the tunnel of trees to Arkady Asylum.
Me, I took the third fork, heading north out of town to where an iron giant, rising above the treeline, had snatched mismatched neon letters in his upraised hand:
SLY’S SALVAGE
Then all at once I was on the brakes and sliding sideways on the slippery blacktop. There, right in the middle of the road, I saw a body.
The giant’s red eyes fixed me as I shook myself out of the cruiser, one hand on my hip, the other tugging at the mike lead like a gun-shy pup. Thankfully I came to my senses before hollering for backup.
What had looked like a human body sprawled across the yellow line was actually a collection of expensive suitcases draped with even more expensive coats. On the top, what I’d took for the white blur of a face was the brass-bound manuscript.
I confess I cussed a while before I called it in. Comedic Justice indeed.
“Looks like they jettisoned anything incriminating before turning into Sly’s,” I told JT. “And I mean just before – we ain’t talking master criminals.”
“No, we’re talking Barney or Ted Sylvester, and Mikey Pollock being opportunistic. But that car will be in bits already and the prime cuts on a boat by tonight.”
“Least they got their story back,” I said.
“Least they do. OK, good work, Deputy Lowell. Drop in at Sly’s, go through the motions, then bring their stuff back here. I’ll call and give them the good news.”
“Ten-four.”
He knew I didn’t need backup now. He knew I knew Ted and Barney well enough and Mary Pollock too, and her waste of air of a son. And he knew what I knew they knew, which was that it would take the whole FBI a whole week to search that yard – and not even FF Almenar the Famous Producer was as important as that.
But I’m not sure he’d thought it through like me, nor seen how FF and his entourage weren’t going to like it. Regardless of how the investigation might be conducted, those coats and cases, that manuscript, were evidence now.
Everything in its place.
##########################################
Down in the dungeon you can hardly hear the dying whale bellow of the lighthouse diaphone that invades people’s dreams like a guilty conscience on foggy nights.
Tonight it seemed the darkness had snuck down the vents with the fog. I had to slide the last page under the old green banker’s lamp.
...his face daubed in crude black and white makeup, the red-painted lips a bloody smear, the dead eyes rolled up into his skull.
FADE OUT.
THE END.
“Well fuck a duck,” I told myself, then looked around to make sure I really was alone.
The things in the cages gazed down on me - terrible secrets in the shadows.
But no white-painted face, no matter how hard I peered.
I flipped the manuscript again.
Joshua Carnby.
Another ghost.
In the world above, John Tracy Hamilton sat on the fringes of his own pool of light, a big, black predator waiting to pounce. Or another lost vessel, without even the hospital for a home harbour these past months. When he looked up it seemed to take him a moment to recognise me.
“Baldassar. Didn’t know you’d doubled shifts as well.”
“Hell, JT, you know the sandman never comes when that horn’s sounding.”
“That he don’t.”
He was skirting me too now, reluctant to bite. I tried to jiggle it closer to him:
“Hey, we should check out the CCTV when you told him he’d have to wait for his precious script back. Wiped that Fat Fella’s grin off his face, you did! Only...”
“What is it, Baldassar?”
“Well, once I’d dusted it – and no dice there - I kind of took a look at it. Because of the name. Funny way to tell a story, all INT this and V.O. that, but I got the swing of it.”
“And?”
“And it was sure enough writ by someone from Shallow Creek.”
“You ain’t telling me that Joshua Carnby has risen from the grave.”
“I’m telling you it’s got details I don’t know how it’s got. About that whole case.”
I could see from his face it was all just myth to him, same as it is to most folks nowadays. Before their time, it was. Before mine too, least my time at the Sheriff’s Department. I’d been a boy counting beans up at the sawmill when it broke – the case, the tragedy – like a winter squall. But happened it had and so I gave him the bones of it: of that God-darn breakfast cereal they brought to town and the character they created to sell it, the Clown, and the poor actor who played the Clown, and what was done to him when the children began to sicken. Some said it was on account of a mould that grew on the nuts, though there’d been talk of the chemical plant up river and an unacknowledged release.
JT was doing that thing with his fingers, that kind of blackjack shuffle I like to think signifies him organising the punch cards in his brain-box.
“Joshua Carnby was the actor, huh?”
“That’s right, JT, rest his soul. Little more than a sprat himself he was, when they done for him. But in the story, as the years go by, there are sightings of a spooky old clown trying to lure kids away from the carnival with tales of an even more magical place - a gingerbread palace. That’s why the entourage was parked down by the old fairground yesterday. And that ain’t all...”
JT grunted. He knew the next part, or thought he did. But it was going to have to be enough for now. The phones all rang at once and we both as near as shat.
“I asked Stacey to switch ’em all through to this one. Guess she did the opposite.” JT chuckled. Then his face froze hard again.
"Lowridge County Sheriff’s Department, Sheriff Hamilton speaking.”
I watched him listen, and uh-huh, and nod. When he set the phone down I watched him shake his head in something between wonder and its opposite. Seemed it wasn’t only Stacey getting ass-backwards lately.
“We’ll pick this up later, Baldassar. Get your piece strapped on. There’s been a disturbance at the Brooke Hotel.”
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Shallow Creek is a mighty peculiar place. It conforms to the law of the land, mostly, and the laws of nature, when it pleases, but the law of averages never seems to get a look in. By which I mean we’ve had our fair share of disturbances for a small town and then some. There were the Disappearances, which I believe I’ve mentioned, the tragedy at Devil’s Gorge, and that business at the Hanging Tree. There was the listing derelict that slid right up to the pier one foggy night like this – presumed vaporised forty years before at Bikini Atoll. That had the laws of physics on the run, as well as everybody else. So the disturbance that greeted us in the street outside the Brooke was strictly small fry for these parts.
JT has a heavier right foot than mine, plus I had to fend off Janet’s avalanche again, so by the time I pulled up what I saw was blue and amber deck lights through the fog. Then figures. Then faces. The faces looked shinier than they ought to have done. It was all the lights on all the sweat and tears.
Shiniest of all: the PA, shaking, distressed. JT was trying to calm her down. Next shiny: Muscles, pumped up in a sleeveless tee from pulling people apart. Then FF himself, in silky robe and slippers... well, carrying the weight he did, he’d probably be sweating just from all the shouting he’d been doing, which was mostly about who was fired and how he should have done it earlier, witnesses said. And then the Prodigy, with the tracks of tears, but looking numb and half froze in her nightwear. Later I couldn’t even recall giving her my jacket, but I did.
Over JT’s shoulder, the PA reminded FF he was a goodfornothing sack of shit and a Dirty Bastard Too.
FF had on that Cheshire grin again.
“And you just kissed your career goodbye, honey, on both coasts.”
“Better than kissing you, asshole!”
And so on. Seems she’d marched out of the hotel in the middle of the night in what she was wearing, which wasn’t much, and demanded Muscles drive her home in the car they hadn’t got. FF had made some attempt to throw her belongings after her and it had started up again in the street.
Being as we were stood there watching, I tried to play lawman with the Prodigy.
“Can you tell me what was the cause of the initial altercation, ma’am?”
I bet she could, but instead she threw a look to FF, who caught it and kind of spun it back. She found my cigarettes and lighter, lit one with an Audrey Hepburn half-smile and said nothing.
After that there wasn’t much we could do but usher everyone back inside and tell the PA where to hire a car in the morning. FF had a protective arm around the Prodigy’s shoulders as he mounted the main staircase, but then he rounded on us as we stood there and he roared:
“I want my script back!”
And as JT batted that one back and forth, I swear the Prodigy asked me, softly:
“Did you read it?”
And I swear too that I haven’t blushed or shook like that in fifty years, nor come up empty of words.
“Ma’am, I...”
“Goodnight, Deputy Lowell,” she said.
Outside, shrugging back into my jacket – and kind of feeling for her warmth, I admit, but finding nothing – I fired up a smoke of my own and offered one to JT.
“Outsiders,” I said, by way of not very much.
He spat.
“Something wrong about having employees you go about in robes with.”
“Something suspicious?”
He looked at me, then gave another ass-backwards head-shake.
“Something wrong.”
We were alone on the intersection. The fog was lifting and there was light in the sky, of sorts. Then that darned diaphone sounded again.
“About the manuscript, JT. About Edward Carnby...”
This time there was no confusion in the way he shook his head.
“Not now, Baldassar. Go home. Get some sleep. Something tells me tomorrow’s gonna be another busy one.”
##########################################
After what the good people of Shallow Creek did to the Clown, you might expect the son to have burned his father’s bloodstained costume and moved the hell away as soon as he was old enough. Edward Carnby did neither. To the horror of the townsfolk, Krinkles rose again.
By then the rumours of the chemical leak had gained some credence – enough to sow the seeds of doubt about what the mob had done. Kids who’d never tasted Krinkle Crunch joined their sweet-toothed classmates in the Lungs. Babies were born wrong, long after the cereal factory got levelled. It was whispered even Edward was touched, though he’d been but a suckling at the time. Later, people said his own offspring shared the affliction: one bound for a padded cell at Arkady, the other for a different institution far inland that specialised in congenital deformities.
So nobody quite knew what to do when the Clown was reborn, first as an act at Bubba’s Bazaar, then as a Children’s Entertainer. Whether through guilt or pity or that thing in between that Mallum calls Curiosity, we’d tolerate him at the circus or the carnival, though it wasn’t what you’d call a mirthful performance and that wheezing cackle got into your head every bit as much as the lighthouse diaphone. Once or twice people even booked him for parties, albeit of the Sophomoronic sort. Those didn’t go well. Course he was mostly always drunk by then.
JT nodded. We were back in the galley, chugging Java like our lives depended on it, which they probably did. Neither of us had slept.
“Busted him myself couple of times. Wasn’t his mom ever there to look out for him?”
“Reckon not. If she fed little Edward the poison through her tit she can’t have lasted long.” I saw his face and wished I’d bit my lip. “But hell, JT, it was over fifty years ago.”
“Meaning who knows what really happened?”
“Meaning someone knows.” I tapped on the script, which had flakes of JT’s Danish on it, like his shirtfront, and was most definitely not in its place.
“Ain’t our concern, Baldassar, least not till they make their movie and it brings the ghouls back to town. Matter of fact, I reached a decision last night on that score. Gonna give this back to them and close the case before the Mayor orders me.”
He’d laid a big hand on the script as he said it and before I knew it I’d done the same.
“Don’t mean we can’t find out what happened and who knows about it. Let me go down to the Chronicle and take a look though their archive...”
And that’s what I did. They know me there. I’ve even advised them on how to keep everything in its place, though that hasn’t yet stretched to microfilm, let alone this newfangled Online. I was deep in the damp, musty ’60s when my two-way squawked.
“Get your ass down to the old fairground. We got a possible one-eight-seven.”
I grabbed what I had and git.
If you were to ask me, I’d say I’d had my suspicions about the identity of the DRT - but that it wasn’t until I’d rocked up in Janet’s cruiser to find its real owner stepping back over the flattened wire in a Sheriff’s Department coat and an off-duty frock and a pair of God-Knows gumboots that they were confirmed. But really I’d known all along.
No mist today – instead that kind of salt-bleached sunlight that makes everything a blur, specially at my age. I followed Janet across acres of weeds and rubble, half-burned sleeping bags, mutilated fiberglass animals and the strange, faded-rainbow cobwebs of wind-torn nylon nets and lines. Whole place stank of shit and fish.
I could see where we were headed. The old Wave Swinger, its crown burned away and the arms at tortured angles. Some of the seats still hung lop-sided from their rusted chains. Most were gone.
At the hub, where the operator had stood, you could make out the ghosts of fantastic sea-creatures in gilded frames. Through the missing boards you could see the body.
Dead Right There, in the middle of this wasteland, where fun went bad and innocence was lost forever.
Everything in its place.
Sheriff Hamilton’s bulk was blocking the view.
“I called in Lopez,” he said. “Didn’t seem to matter anymore.”
“I don’t need to see it, JT. I’ve already seen it!”
He heard the fear in my voice and fixed me with a sudden glare.
“Hell do you mean by that?”
“In the story...” I tried to say - but even I could tell that made no sense.
“Baldassar, have you already been here? What have you seen?”
The face daubed in black and white... the red-painted lips a bloody smear...
“No. Nothing.” I said. I reached into my jacket for my cigarettes and found the fistful of newspaper cuttings instead.
“Deputy Lowell, this is your territory, so get a grip.” JT gestured toward FF Almenar the Famous Producer and soon-to-be-infamous corpse. I saw the empty can of boat paint next to him, and the tar. Suddenly I realised that the sheaf of papers in the Sheriff’s gloved hand wasn’t crime scene notes he was about to pass to me, it was the manuscript. “It’s been made to look like some crazy Clown killing, like in this story. So who could know about that?”
“His entourage...” I fumbled. “The PA, the bodyguard...”
“Both accounted for in Will Sanders’ car rental agency from the time FF left the hotel to when we picked them up.”
“The Prod... I mean his actress companion, Alexandra?”
“Miss Dyle is unaccounted for at present, but witnesses place her in the breakfast room at the Brooke until well after FF left. One of those witnesses is me, when I went looking for him to return this script. We don’t yet have a time of death but by the looks of him my guess is it will save us asking her any awkward questions.” JT pulled a sheepish face, as though practising. “Who else, Baldassar?”
“The family - but they’re all dead or accounted for. Joshua Carnby is in the ground. His wife too, we was just saying. Edward went overboard from Old Man Cody’s boat what, two year back? His poor son, Josh, has been jabbering baby-talk in Arkady Asylum for twenty years or more. And the other child, if they ever gave it a name, was shipped off to some scientific freakshow for being a monster. Their mother died in childbirth. Don’t see how it can be any of them.”
“Yet you said it yourself: someone knows what happened. Someone from Shallow Creek wrote that story. I’d say there’s a good chance FF arranged to meet him here.”
Janet cleared her throat.
“Maybe you could ask her.”
At the limits of my vision a lone figure was tippy-toeing over the fence. We intercepted her before she got too close.
“Is it him? Is it FF?” I guess that’s what shock looks like, on her. Dead-eyed, white-faced. I fancy I saw more blood drain from her cheeks and lips as she realised we weren’t saying anything to deny it.
“May I ask where you’ve been the last couple of hours, Miss Dyle?” That was JT. Watching her like I was – seeing her - I couldn’t hardly speak.
“Walking, down by the Creek. I had to clear my head. Something made me come this way. An intuition.” Gazing past us to where the part-time crime scene specialist and evidence technician from the hospital were hunkered down, she gave a shiver. “Then I spotted the - costumes.”
“Anybody see you along there by the Creek?”
“Yes, I think. There were people. There were always people.”
“Did you ever meet the person who wrote this?”
Her eyes went down to the manuscript without really seeing it.
“Joshua Carnby?” That faraway voice. She was full-on D for distant, dreamy, dreaming again.
“We know it wasn’t him.”
And then abruptly, but somehow slowly too, she was back with us. Almost.
“You think you know so much!”
“What don’t we know, Miss Dyle?”
And she met our eyes, person by person, JT’s, mine, before latching onto Janet’s.
“How it is, with men like that. They think because they’ve made you you’re just a thing...”
That’s when the tears came, and all the rest. JT told Janet to take her back to the office and get her settled in the galley.
He pulled a face.
“Thought she wasn’t going to go, there, for a minute.”
“They always go, JT,” I said. I knew now why he’d been so quick to recall Lopez.
“You had me worried you was gonna go first, as it happens.”
I spat, rubbed it in with my boot.
“Out of practice, I guess.”
“Guess we all were,” he growled and went off to talk to the others.
I squinted back towards the figures at the fence – just two light-dark flickers now.
I pulled the cuttings from my jacket pocket. The top one, with the picture of the Clown, had the headline: LOCAL ENTERTAINER LYNCHED.
The one underneath was a background piece on him and his new wife and their baby boy. There was a grainy photograph, much enlarged, that showed them being introduced to the Mayor at the grand opening of the Krinkle Crunch factory. He looked so young and fresh and full of hope and promise.
So did his wife. And of course she looked exactly like Audrey Hepburn.
With a kind of gulp that JT would have said was me going, I scrunched up the cuttings and thrust them back inside my pocket. It wouldn’t do him any good to see them. He wouldn’t understand.
He wouldn’t understand about who lures who these days, and how, and why, and what goes on in that gingerbread palace of theirs. Or that it could have been the family, but maybe not – because there are other people who know what happened and they’re the people who cornered Joshua Carnby that day, right here on this very spot. They have to live with this and see it over and over and maybe that’s the point.
The dead eyes rolled up into his skull...
Off by the fence, the women had vanished. Now it was only the gulls swooping, circling, cackling. Sometimes I think they’ll never stop.
Or maybe it’s like getting lost in the woods. You wind up spooking yourself and that’s what sends you deeper into trouble. Maybe, for all its mysteries, this place is nothing but the woods - and it’s what you bring to Shallow Creek of your own free will that turns around and gets you in the end.
Maybe.
© Paul Phillips