Dead Silent Read online

  Horror/New Adult Dark Fantasy

  Chris Chandler is trying to escape the glare of the media while the State of Maine reviews his conviction and investigates the disappearance of so many corpses from Bemishstock. He flees to the tiny town of Lewis, Vermont where he’s been invited to house-sit the estate of a mysterious family with a history stretching back to the thirteenth century and the Albigensian Crusade. There he discovers one of the town’s prodigal sons has recently returned with a plan for a Goth festival and Grand Guignol Theater, which he’ll fund…with human remains.

  Once again, Chris and Gillian must do battle with grave robbers and hostile officials, this time with the aid of an ancient amulet and the spirit world itself, while they also struggle to free Chris of Mallory Dahlman’s vengeful spirit.

  Dead Silent © 2018 by Ivan Blake

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, or events, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  MuseItUp Publishing

  https://museituppublishing.com

  Cover Art © 2018 by Charlotte Volnek

  Layout and Book Production by Lea Schizas

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-77392-008-5

  First eBook Edition *June 2018

  For my sons, Christopher and Timothy

  who inspire everything I try to do.

  Acknowledgements

  I’m exceedingly grateful to my remarkable editor and polymath, Lea Schizas, to my family and friends, and in particular, to my sister Pam, for their encouragement and support, and of course, to my extraordinary life partner, Heather, whose patience and endurance throughout this process have earned her more walks and bike rides together than I can count.

  Dead Silent

  The Mortsafeman: Book 2

  Ivan Blake

  MuseItUp Publishing

  www.museituppublishing.com

  The Mortsafeman

  Dead Scared

  Dead Silent

  I, like so many of you here tonight, have lived with the nightmare that my sainted wife, when eventually she passes away, will not be able to find the gates of Paradise without my help. Alas, she still has the heart of an angel, but age has robbed her of her intellect. I am terrified she may lose her way. I fear she will miss the Great Light, become lost and confused, and awaken, not in Paradise where she belongs, but just beyond death, in the Realm of Shades.

  The Realm of Shades is a gray, formless place where the dead look back at the living as if through a gauze curtain, where their former lives are now beyond their grasp or ken. The loneliness and terror of the departed in that terrible place must be overwhelming, their sense of betrayal so heartbreaking, and the icy grasp of fear on their souls so paralyzing that all they can do is scream, scream for our help, scream for guidance, and scream at their prospect of unending torment if no aid is forthcoming. But alas, if we do not learn how to hear their pleas, how to sense their cries for help, then their screams will be forever silent...dead silent.

  Duxbridge Congregational Hall Lecture, March 16, 1887

  Dr. Michael Saint-John Rainsworthy

  President, Oxford Institute for the Aid and Guidance of the Recently Departed

  Prologue

  April 19, 1244

  From the Records of the Inquisitors of Carcassonne

  Interview Seventeen

  Inquisitor: You live in the village of Berneau on the east slope of Mount Pog, immediately below the heretic citadel of Monsegur. You are fifty-two. Your husband is the village blacksmith. Is that correct?

  Woman: Yes.

  Inquisitor: Tell us about your family.

  Woman: My two sons live nearby with their wives and children and work with their father in our forge. My husband is teaching them his trade. My brother lives on the edge of the village and is a carpenter. My daughter and her two children are staying in our cottage while her husband...is away.

  Inquisitor: In the service of the heretic, Raymond VII of Toulouse.

  Woman: Yes.

  Inquisitor: Tell us what you recall of the days leading up to the conquest of Monsegur.

  Woman: We lived in terror. We had no food or fresh water. We could not leave our cottage during daylight because from sunup to sundown the trebuchet constructed by the Basques across the valley tossed great boulders over our heads against the walls of the citadel. Broken stonework from the battered walls rained down on our heads, killed our animals in the fields and drove many of our neighbors into the citadel for safety. Even at night we lived in fear that a section of the fortress might crumble and send an avalanche of shattered walls tumbling over the cliffs and down onto our homes as we lay in our beds. Nor could we sleep for the noise at night. Shouts and songs around a hundred cooking fires and the clamor of a dozen forges rose into the night from the huge Catholic encampment in the valley, and echoed across the hills and valleys of Languedoc. We were exhausted, hungry, terrified.

  Inquisitor: Why did you not join many of your neighbors inside the citadel?

  Woman: Because of the promise made by Hugues des Arcis. He said villagers would be left in peace after the siege was lifted so long as we renounced our Cathar faith and agreed to be interviewed by Your Holinesses. I was not willing to jeopardize the future of our children by joining the forces inside the citadel.

  Inquisitor: Unusually sensible for a woman. Now describe what happened in the nights immediately before the citadel’s surrender.

  Woman: Four nights before the surrender, my brother and a dozen of our neighbors came to our door seeking help. Normally, my husband and I would not leave our cottage at night for any reason, but they explained that several Perfecti had escaped from the citadel down ropes to the bottom of the Lasset Gorge. I was angry that my neighbors should bring us such news. I reminded them that we had vowed not to join the fight. The Perfecti were not asking us to fight, my brother explained. They wanted our help to move their treasure. Not gold, I said, since the Perfecti had given their word to the Catholics that all gold had already been removed from Monsegur. Not gold, my brother reassured me, only manuscripts and relics of our faith, material the Catholics would care nothing for. Well, said my husband, they have been our leaders since childhood, so...we should help.

  Inquisitor: And where was this treasure?

  Woman: In a cave beneath the citadel.

  Inquisitor: What happened then?

  Woman: My husband and I wrapped ourselves against the cold and joined the others outside.

  Inquisitor: Your daughter and grandchildren remained behind?

  Woman: Yes. Only the older women joined the men. For three nights, with villagers from Pierreais and Ste. Martine, we carried the Perfecti treasure away from the mountain. Forty-six of us, marching in a silent procession over rocks and through narrow passages, carrying chests of books and scrolls, boxes of rusted and broken bric-a-brac including several spears and assorted nails, cases of wine and exotic oils, various cups and bowls, and even some sort of enormous candle holder. We carried the treasure from the slopes of Mount Pog all the way to the banks of the Lasset River and into a network of caves the Perfecti had discovered.

  Inquisitor: Could you find these caves again?

  Woman: No, I swear. We walked in darkness through an endless maze of tiny valleys, our eyes fixed only on the person immediately in front of us.

  Inquisitor: Continue.

  Woman: Each trek took many hours and we barely made it back to our homes before dawn. During the days, the Perfecti hid beneath our
cottages in tiny dugouts used, in better times, to store our vegetables. On the third night, we removed the last of their treasure, and the oddest assortment of all. There were letters encased in glass, small chairs and a cradle, several chests of very old and very fragile textiles, like swaddling clothes, and a winding cloth for the dead. There was even an assortment of children’s toys including a carved horse and a tiny doll. The last and the most revered object of all was also the most difficult to transport, an ossuary. The Perfecti treated the stone box with great reverence. Unusually large and very ornate, it took six men at a time, and many, many hours to carry it, but no one complained.

  Inquisitor: Why not?

  Woman: Because its contents were no mystery. At the end of our trek, in the deepest cave of all, as two Perfecti slid the ossuary against the farthest wall, we all gathered to watch. The lid had shifted slightly during its transport, and we each stepped forward, in turn, to look inside. Emmanuelle Foix was the last to look.

  Inquisitor: Following the surrender of the Citadel, Emmanuelle Foix chose to be burned along with the two hundred other unrepentant heretics, did she not?

  Woman: She did.

  Inquisitor: Continue.

  Woman: The Perfecti asked my husband to shift the lid back into place because he’s so strong. Emmanuelle, whose father had once been a wealthy trader and had taught her many languages including Greek and Hebrew, then stepped in front of the ossuary again, ran her hand across the inscription on its lid, and whispered, “Our Beloved Companion.”

  Inquisitor: Blasphemy!

  Woman: Yes, Your Holiness.

  Inquisitor: You have spoken well for a simple woman. Do you also read?

  Woman: Yes, I read Latin, and Occitan. All Cathar women...

  Inquisitor: I ask you again, do you read?

  Woman: Yes, Your Holiness.

  Inquisitor: Surely you must know what the Holy Scriptures say about women who read?

  Woman: I…I am not familiar…

  Inquisitor: The Scriptures say they are witches. So I ask you one more time, do you read?

  Woman: No, Your Holiness.

  Inquisitor: Woman, you have confessed you were a Cathar Credenta. Do you now renounce your Cathar transgressions, beg the forgiveness of our Lord, Jesus Christ, and cleave forevermore to the faith of the Holy Roman Church?

  Woman: I do, Your Holiness.

  Chapter 1

  December 1986

  On the road, heading home to Vermont after a decade away, Gilbert Burgoyne was looking forward to his best goddamn Christmas ever. They’d be in Lewis in a week if the weather held. Dolli, on the seat beside him, was snoring in time with the country version of Silent Night on the radio, and the tires on his 1959 Cadillac Miller-Meteor hearse were whining like a bitch in heat. They were rolling through the warm Texas late afternoon with a coffin full of Mexican ivory in the back, and a future full of possibilities.

  Gilbert hadn’t been sorry to leave Barnes, Arizona. What a sad, dusty, yazzy little town it had been, absolutely end-of-the-road goddamn nowhere. But he’d spent six years in Barnes and it had changed him. He’d met Dolli, discovered playwriting, and created his new business in re-purposed human remains. It tickled him to think how, at the butt end of the universe, everything had so magically fallen into place.

  Gilbert had arrived in Arizona on a road trip with a couple of buddies. They’d spent three wild days in Hermosillo, Mexico, right after getting out of the army, then broke and hungover, they’d taken some dirt road back across the border and ended up in Barnes where some huge Indian cop had thrown them in jail for driving too fast through town. After a night in a bug-infested cell, his buddies had paid their fines and left Barnes as soon as they got their asses in gear, but Gilbert had gone for a walk around town looking for breakfast. He followed some good looking, big-assed squaw into the local clinic where he discovered the town needed a nurse, and since he’d been an army medic, he qualified, so for some inexplicable reason, on the spur of the moment he decided to stay. Well, maybe his decision wasn’t so inexplicable. The last thing Gilbert wanted in all the world had been to return to goddamn Lewis, Vermont, to his dad’s hell-hole of a movie theater where Gilbert had worked from the time he could walk until the day he’d enlisted, and to his aimless and excruciating existence as Big Bo Burgoyne’s son. And Barnes, Arizona, was about as far away from Lewis, Vermont, as one could get in the lower forty-eight.

  Amazingly, he’d managed to make a kind of a life for himself in Barnes, the incredibly pale white guy with the creepy gray eyes, as everyone knew him. He rented a couple of rooms over a laundromat in a strip mall, ate every meal at the diner where they called him milkman, and fell in love with stargazing, alone, out in the desert. In fact, he’d been out in the desert stargazing when he first happened upon the skull that changed his life.

  He’d found Mort—seemed an appropriate nickname at the time—half buried in a sand dune late one night, and for weeks thereafter, Mort sat stuffed with red Christmas lights on Gilbert’s bedside table like the weirdest night-light ever. Mort’s real name had probably been Javier or Jesus or Conchita or some such fesskin name since he’d almost certainly been a stupid fence-hopper who died of thirst trying to get to Tucson, but Gilbert didn’t hold that against him. He rechristened Mort white and made him a sort-of friend in the same stupid way some buddies in Grenada befriended their M16s. But then Gilbert needed fifty bucks to fix the shocks on the hearse so he put an ad in Weird Magazine, and within days, Mort was off to California.

  Gilbert had been sorry to see Mort go, but then on another starlit night, he’d come across a second skeleton huddled under a stone outcropping. It was a sign; Mexican ivory, chuco gold, out there in the sand, just waiting to be found. Within six months, he’d sold eleven skulls and three complete skeletons. Not bad at all. On one hike alone, he found two adults and a kid under a canvas sheet where they’d huddled together in a last desperate attempt to escape the blazing sun. He had to do a bit of cleaning up with that group; there’d still been some meat on their bones, but what a price he got for the kid!

  One night, he came across a poor bastard—couldn’t have been more than sixteen—who wasn’t quite dead, lyingin the dirt, begging for water. Gilbert stayed with the boy for an hour, maybe two. Of course he didn’t waste any water on the kid, but he talked to him about stars and constellations and comets until the boy finally died. Then Gilbert took the kid’s head and hands. Now that had been messy. Afterwards, he covered what remained of the boy with sand and sagebrush so he could harvest the rest another time.

  After selling his third skull, Gilbert had set up a small factory in a rented storage locker on the outskirts of town. Okay, so maybe his factory wasn’t much more than a work table, a grinding tool to shape teeth, a tub of lye for stripping flesh, and a bucket filled with strong tea for aging bone. But what a business he did after that, sending “authentic” werewolf, vampire and even alien remains all over the world.

  Apart from his secret enterprise, Gilbert had lived a fairly normal life. He got along with kids who came into the clinic, made friends with the two old ladies who handled the paperwork, and persuaded the clinic’s board of management to sell him their old ambulance, the converted 1959 Cadillac Miller-Meteor hearse which Gilbert repainted black and tinkered with most evenings. He made a few friends at the local car club, and over the years, dated a couple of girls, but the girls either bored him or he creeped them out so nothing much came of his relationships, not until he met Dolli, that is.

  Gilbert called her Dolli but she called herself Doloroso Morgana; why, she wouldn’t explain. Gilbert figured her real name was probably some yazzy name which made even less sense than Doloroso, so he never pressed.

  Dolli had been working in the tribal office and taking extension courses in bookkeeping and playwriting at the Sonoran Desert Career Center across town. She was tall and really skinny but had great boobs, and because she had some really weird pale blotches on her face, she caked her face
in this creepy white makeup, like you see on French mimes. Against her jet black hair and mahogany skin, the white makeup was startling, and Gilbert found the effect kind of a turn on. She always wore long black dresses and stockings with huge holes, like some kind of vampire.

  In Houston, where Dolli’d lived for a while, she’d befriended a bunch of Goths, and since she was so incredibly smart, and they’d been all philosophic and literary, they’d loved her native inscrutability and she’d loved their reading and poetry writing. Then, because she’d gotten pregnant, she’d come home to Barnes where she promptly lost the baby. That was probably why she was so grim all the time, but Gilbert liked her look and her morbid silence, and since she didn’t mind his small business venture, she moved in with him. In fact, she became the brains behind the system of PO Box numbers and fake addresses they employed for advertising in Weird Magazine and mailing packages anonymously.

  One evening, Dolli had been scheduled to read aloud to her class the first draft of her one-act play about some stupid Indian princess who kills herself, and she’d begged Gilbert to come along to critique her performance. He relented...and the experience was life-changing. Not Dolli’s reading, it was crap, but another reading by one of her classmates, a one-act play about bloody torture and a crazed murderer—written, according to its author, in the manner of Grand Guignol—absolutely blew Gilbert away. The next morning, he went straight to the town library to find out what the hell Grand Guignol meant, and as he read about its twisted and ghastly history, fireworks went off in his brain.

  Grand Guignol had been the name of an infamous theater, which flourished in Paris’s Place Pigalle for more than a century. The Theater staged plays with a distinctly bleak worldview, plays that explored insanity, hypnosis, and panic, all the conditions under which uncontrolled horror could happen. The Theater had given its name to a genre of drama in which crimes rarely had any discernible cause, evildoers were rarely defeated, and gore and suffering without limit filled every corner of the stage. Grand Guignol audiences were known to throw up, pass out, and run screaming from their seats.