Small Wonder
a paranormal detective story by Fred Nolan
It’s October. It’s Friday the 13th. And I just had yet another birthday. (Those suckers are zombie-like relentless.)
So this one isn’t too spooky, despite the timing. Unsettling perhaps is a better term. Strange is another good word. Maybe a little bit of Twilight Zone for good measure. It’s a detective story, but without a detective, and in a paranormal setting in a world not quite our own, with a conclusion to satisfy the sleuth in all of us.
Small Wonder
by Fred Nolan
1. Empirical
It was Samantha, at county, who got me the job cataloging the ice.
Might not sound like much, a hundred a month, but then I don’t do much. I sit, mostly. I was doing that anyway, before she thought to pay me.
At least once a night though, I walk under the viaduct for an hour, trying to warm my hands and get a feel for what’s new. Samantha said not to write the visitors’ names down. She said not to call the police if we solved a case.
She said, ‘You’re only here in case someone falls in.’
That used to happen a lot. Now that it doesn’t, the walk is all I have.
You know what would be a good case to solve? If someone broke in and set all of Burton’s livestock free. He’s a good fellow, tall kids, but that man has two hundred acres he could do anything with. He could grow beets. Or if plants were too quiet, he could have peacocks. Call it a petting zoo and let kids pay to chase the birds around.
But instead, he’s got chimpanzees, which he only raises for the noise. Expensive noise. It’s close enough it sounds like an airport most days.
If a time ever comes the monkeys are gone, that part of the bay ice’ll look clean and pure again, like a postcard with some of the water cut out. Just a big blank space.
2. Charismatic
Till then the apes drop one at a time. From cold, mostly. That’s when Burton will visit and hand me a twenty. Every time he comes, he brings it up the same way: ‘Eli, take care of something for me?’
He’ll say, ‘It’s near the gate, you can’t miss it. Do it before the old lady wakes up, alright?’
His wife is kind to me, we can’t have her look out and see that monkey, its dead face all froze up.
Burton wants the chimps buried at sea but he doesn’t trust himself on the ice. So when it’s mid-winter I’ll have to walk thirty minutes to find the edge, then float the monkey off. I bet it takes an hour to sink all the way, with the fish and silt and my ex-bicycles.
Thirty minutes with a dead ape on the shoulder, both our legs stiff as rocks. Hairy rocks. His arms will be locked in a reach-out, like he’s asking for someone to hold him close.
It’s only him and me out there. So who do you think he’s asking?
I always reply, ‘I will. But you can’t tell Samantha.’
‘I wouldn’t do that, Eli.’
He’ll smile and I’ll smile and I’ll say I knew you was coming. He’ll say I knew you knew and then we’ll wink like we got away with murder. We were in the war, though, so I guess we did.
3. Academic
It’s quiet tonight. Cold. Light snow. There’s a campfire four hundred meters over there.
You know how snow makes the bright colors come out? Well, look at the reds in that fire. Look at the oranges, too. The yellows. Those colors could kill a diamond.
I should blow a whistle at the campers, but Samantha didn’t let me put a stop to things. No whistle, either. She would have told me, ‘You’re not a cop, Eli, so don’t act like one.’ I would have shot back, ‘But their fire is going to melt the ghosts.’
Then she would have put her hand on my hand and say, ‘The ghosts will be thawed out by May anyhow. So in the end, what would it change?’
Tonight a woman comes up, my first visitor in a week. I’ve been trying to remember things but I can’t. Hell, I shouldn’t call them memories anymore, I might as well call them forgettings. The woman walks right through those and sends them off like cigar smoke.
She’s clumsy and brittle. But she wants to rush, you can see it. She’s slowfast, I suppose.
She starts bawling. Her nose was already bleeding:
‘My Paul, my Lucas! I’m so — .’ She’s got a young, sleepy voice. All them raggy clothes, I thought she was eighty.
She doesn’t make it to the ice, neither. She’s three meters from shore when she lets herself fall.
I’m a while to get there and my boots are cold. I don’t know if I should touch her shoulder, but she reaches up and takes my arm. She cries on it, bleeds, gets snot and spit and mud all over it. Goddamn she’s beautiful, but for now it’s just ugly things coming out.
‘Are you looking for someone, miss?’
‘It was two nights ago. Or it could have been today. Or they might still— ’
‘That’s all you know?’
‘That’s all.’
‘It’s alright. It’ll be fine. We’ll find them.’
I was helping her stand. She weighs barely anything, so I did it with one arm. She was simmering down but what I said makes her sob again: ‘Not here! Please not here.’
‘I know, lady. I meant we’ll make sure they ain’t apparitions. Then you can find them for real.’
We take our first steps on the ice. It moans under our weight. The pretty woman moans under a weight, too.
4. Ambush
What are they, the apparitions? The likenesses, the second lives? I couldn’t say if you wanted me to. Are they souls stuck in the ice? Messages? A prank that never stops?
Are they windows to some other place? Are they doors?
No one knows or wants to know. But I’ve been at it a long time and I can tell you this: if five people die in town tonight, there will be five new pictures on the ice by morning. It never fails.
On nights that no one dies, the ice stays like it is.
The second lives would be hard to fake. If you couldn’t hoax me with stained glass, you couldn’t hoax me like this. They’re portraits. They’re ornate, though not the way you might think. The likenesses are sad, and a little scary.
Did you know, that’s why Burton owns the chimpanzees? Our city is seventeen million, which means three thousand dead a week, and every one of them leaves over the bay through here. Maybe they’re quick, but they stay long enough to make a mark. It don’t matter which church they went to, or if they believed. Everyone who dies stains the ice. Atheists, Catholics, Europeans, doesn’t matter.
Old man Burton? He believes. And he’s the only one who lives closer to the bay than me. So he breeds monkeys to make noise and keep the souls away. Or that’s the idea.
I show the woman all the new apparitions, anything from the last two days. I tell her: ‘You’d recognize them if you see them, but you need to know something.’
‘What’s that?’
‘The pictures out here, it’s not always them. Well it is but it ain’t. They could look older, or younger. Or skinnier. Or one of them could be a girl.’
‘One of my boys could be a girl but I’d recognize him anyway?’
‘I know it’s crazy, but it works. I don’t say this as a church man, I say this— ’
I fight to get the word back but it’s gone. What the hell is it, scientific, anecdotal, circumstantial? That’s the problem with language, every term has a dozen close others but only one is perfect. And once you lose it, you lose that thing it means, too.
5. Reference
My wife bought me a notebook for that, the poor girl. She told me to write my forgotten words down. Academic, charismatic, quilt. When she gave it to me she tapped her head. ‘They’re still up there, honey. You say things like it starts with a T, or there’s an EL in it. And you’re always right. It’s the bridge to the word that you lose, not the word itself. So build that bridge again.’
I wanted it to be true, but I’d spent my war years blowing those up. Roads, ramps, bridges. How did she think I knew how to build them back? Or deserved to?
After coffee I write out the one from last night: empirical. That’s what I was trying to say, that I wasn’t spiritual, just an empirical observer. You don’t need to believe in a god or a second life, you only need to believe what I’ve seen. I’ve been at this since the ice had likenesses at all.
Is it going to work, writing down my word-ghosts? Maybe, but I saw what happened to papa. He tried that and tried everything else, and once his speech was gone, he was gone, too. The only thing left was a drunk, empty slate.
I didn’t look for papa’s second life after he passed. I didn’t think I could take it, seeing whatever he’d been trying to be. I paid a neighbor kid my hundred a month and took the winter off. Who knows if the boy even showed up.
The likenesses melt every spring. Thank god papa’s sank to the bottom and drowned, with the ocean’s other drowned things.
6. Articulate
The young mother comes again after lunch. She introduces herself as Ianna Parte. She drove this time. There are bicycles in the trunk. Two kids’ bikes.
She says, ‘We could take Bayfront up, then park at the plaza and ride across. I have binoculars, too.’
The bikes are the same size. I ask, ‘Are your boys twins? Identical twins?’
‘They are. Paul and Lucas.’
That’s good news. Identical twins dead at the same time, or close to the same, show up as each other. An old man’s second life might be a woman half his age. It’s still his face, you know it’s him if you look. But if you’re trying to find a grandfather among tens of thousands of other ghosts, you’re not going to be looking for a woman.
A twin’s second life, though, is his brother. Paul will show up as Lucas; Lucas will show up as Paul. Every time.
And since we didn’t see twins among the new apparitions, we know they’re alive. When I tell her that, she tries lifting her arms to hold me, but her relief is too heavy to carry. She has that other kind of bereavement now, the kind that really knocks you down. She is taken over by sobs.
‘I’m so— , I’m— !’
I tell her I know. I know she is. Whatever she is.
And when she is calm again, she asks me to come along, to confront a woman at the park office. ‘She told me they were dead but wouldn’t say anything else. Wouldn’t say how, or when. I can’t go in there alone. Not again.’
‘But I can’t lose this job, miss. The county won’t let me investigate. I could go to jail.’
‘It will only be an hour. You’re here for our protection, am I wrong? The survivors’ protection?’
Those eyes of hers. She says, ‘Because she’ll kill me if I go in there myself. She is a witch, she already told me they killed my boys.’
I hate that I agree because of her looks. But that don’t matter, I’ve agreed, it’s done, let’s get it behind us.
7. Extortion
I didn’t realize when she said park she meant trailer park. The office woman is not quite the angel of death I thought, neither. Skinny, tight denim, a cheap jacket. A big phone in her pocket.
Ianna sees her and goes into a rage. A blind one, and I mean blind, closing her eyes for the worst parts. She punches and claws. Bites. Her threats are horrible. I know I ought to step in, and when the leasing agent fights back, I do.
The woman has blood on her lip. Crazy hair. ‘Little junkie whore! You sleep five days a week, your kids run all over. They’re here most times, them sweet little voices. So my husband made a sweet soup of their bones, you should take some.’
Ianna turns wild, pulling at my grip like a fight dog. I’ve got a hand around her waist.
I try to say, above all the yelling, ‘Ma’am, I am Eli Scott of the lake watch. I know no twins died tonight or any other night. I can recognize them in the ice in a second. I never miss a ghost. So I came here to say, no kids died this week, not a one.’
Some of that is me bluffing, and I’m afraid the woman will bluff me back, which would start them fighting again. But all she says is, ‘Her? I want out. Not just out of the office but out of my park. You won’t remember, but you helped find my aunt when I was in tech school. She was on the far side of the bay. Way out.’
‘I do remember.’ I’m lying again, or still. The woman seems to know but I guess she appreciates it.
She turns to Ianna. ‘Does that work for you, junkie? I’ll show sugar daddy all he needs to know.’
‘Go to hell.’ But Ianna gives in by meeting my stare. You can see it in her look, all she wants is an unsplit heart again.
8. Class action lawsuit
The agent, whose name plate says Owens, takes me through a busted part of the fence, out the back of the park. It is a dirty side of town. Reflexology, palm reader. A church in the middle of it all.
At last we get to their neighborhood, where every block smells like something different.
Two streets up is a truck with a moving van. They've got boxes in the yard, ready to load. There’s a man, sort of a dog-looking man, so a yard is the best place for him. He has long eyes and a weak mouth. His shirt is wet, even if it’s freezing out.
He sees me and says, ‘What’s all this? Barbara?’
‘His name is Scott, he watches the ice.’
‘I know what he does. I meant, you brought him over?’
‘He wants to try the soup.’
The man looks for half a minute, remembering everything. He says, ‘You’re kidding.’
I want to shoot back, Not kidding, Owens. Bring me the largest bowl you got. But I stay quiet.
When we’re done staring he pushes his mouth out, his shoulder up. He says, ‘Come on, have a sip then.’
It is a slow walk to the kitchen. I’d pass Owens and do it myself, but who knows what’s waiting for me in there. The house smells savory, that much is sure, and there’s a two hundred-quart stock pot with a hot red broth in it.
‘You want a taste? Here it is.’ Owens takes a wooden spoon and stirs from the bottom. A small skull comes up. The lower jaw is gone and the son of a bitch knocked the top teeth out.
I shout and step back, my skin’s got needles everywhere. There’s a weird sunset all over me.
I’m stammering. Owens is one of those who watches your words come out and mouths along, so he’s stammering, too. I say, ‘She’ll call the police. You’ll hang.’
‘Hang for what? You know Parte, she couldn’t find a phone if she was sleeping on it.’
‘Then I’ll call. You’ll be booked in an hour.’
‘County don’t listen to you. You told us that the first time.’
I think, Dang, girl. You wrote all that down as law then you left. Now it’s all on me and our house and the thing that happens to ice when I’m around.
I answer, ‘Still, they’ll put you away.’
‘Put me away for what?’
‘For goddamn murder, Owens!’
‘There’s not a jury would convict us.’
I bend and throw up on his floor, then surprise myself by apologizing. Saying sorry just comes out, it’s the same as being sick. On my way back to the lake I think of a longer route home, to stay clear of the trailers.
9. Jasmine
Sometimes, like tonight, I pass a whole night on the shore. I’m in that old chair again, and whatever is in that old air just cuts through. That’s how I remember, it wasn’t an aunt who went missing, it was the Owens’ kid. Not even ten.
I’d heard of the Owens already. They were in the news, some kind of racket. They were arrested, though nothing came of it.
When we found the second life it was dark out. You’d heard that lady crying but you’d lost sight of her, so it was like the whole bay was crying. An ocean in mourning.
Think about what waves are, if that’s what the Atlantic can do.
Their child left a huge apparition, more than eight square meters. The picture wasn’t a girl. It wasn’t a boy, neither. The likeness was a manta ray, a deep black color. I’d seen animal portraits before but this was different. She must have really been something.
I helped cut the ice away and load it in their car. ‘It will melt,’ I tried to warn them. ‘Leave it here, I’ll keep campers off it. You can come every day. By spring we’ll’ve figured something out.’
Barbara said, ‘It’s not just a ghost, it’s her. You say it will melt but we want it to. We want her back in her room, and all through our house.’
I thought, What if that’s how it works?
What if, when the Owens took the likeness home, the ice thawed a drop at a time, and that’s how the soul came free? What if the girl returned to the floors as droplets, scattering all over?
I guess I wouldn’t mind if, in the end, I scattered the exact same way.
10. Barry Goldwater
Ianna is at the lake again mid-morning. It embarrasses me that I slept here. My lips must be hamburger chuck.
She’s irate: ‘You never came back, you never told me what they said.’ She has a pamphlet, something like what a church would leave on your windshield. She twists it better than she would twist a woman’s neck.
I tell her, with no proof: ‘Your boys are alive. As for where they are, or what the Owens are up to— ’
I can't go on, the chimpanzees are loud as rockets today. My attention is in a skid.
Ianna says, ‘What on earth?’
‘It’s the Burton ranch. You can’t see it from here, it’s on Villa de Marco a half-kilometer— .’ My hand is stuck in mid-air.
She asks me what happened and I say, ‘Jesus.’
‘What, Eli? What?’
I rush out toward the northern ice edge. Ianna is following, ranting about her sons, her parents, the cops. About the boys’ father, who she doesn’t know anymore. Between her and the chimpanzees, it’s going to be a loud half-hour.
‘What’s happening, sir? What are we doing?’
I answer, ‘Those were chimpanzee skulls. It proves they’re lying. That’s why he knocked the teeth out and why there’s moving boxes. They’re taking your boys south.’
All I need is a glimpse. You’d think she could stay quiet enough for me to have that one look, and point it out.
‘That doesn’t make sense. I’d just call the police.’
‘Yes, but they knew you wouldn’t. And then you didn’t. You came straight here, to say goodbye. The only thing that doesn’t make sense about their plan is you.’
Now I see them. Two apes, three days ago. Perfect side-by-side squares. Bare ice.
I point and say, ‘There. That’s when they say your boys died. Does that look anything like your boys to you?’
‘Course not.’
‘Then they’re alive. The Owens are selling the place and bringing the twins along.’
‘Eli — ,’ but she can’t say it. Sleep, worry and substance abuse have been most of her life. Small wonder, then, that without those, she has nothing.
‘Was that your car the other day? Have someone block the Owens in until the police come.’
Why does livestock show up as a blank apparition? Like I said, a twin’s likeness is his brother, his second life. But an animal does not have a second life, only the first. The blank portrait is the finished portrait. Don’t ask me why monkeys show up and birds don’t, for all we know birds are ghosts already.
Samantha is going to have to forgive me, the poor girl. I solved a crime and brought in the cops anyway.
It was a good case, though. I think she’d have been alright with it.
Meet the author:
Fred Nolan is a speculative fiction writer who lives in Texas. In Fred’s view, the expression underside can be taken as a positive here, synonymous with flip-side instead of underbelly. Whether it is a place, a person, a work of art, or one of Eli’s apparitions, the most fascinating and rewarding are those we might be inclined to overlook. While he did not compose “Small Wonder” with this idea in mind, he believes it is a common thread throughout.
Please say hello on Twitter: @The_Fredwords.
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