There’s no shadowy government agency that’s brought in to deal with this, it’s just me, one man out of his depth and a a few “experts” who have all never seen the other side of a computer. If I could call up someone qualified I would…I had, but the yellow pages sort of runs out of puff when you’ve scared off all the hippies in Sydney who still think Ouija boards are spooky.
I tried a priest once; he was an imaginative fellow who probably watched the exorcist too many times and then took it as a how-to guide. He shouted, he prayed and cursed until he was blue in the face, but the ghost didn’t seem to mind all that much. We sat on the steps later and shared a Thermos of tea that I had brought when he meekly apologised, offering to have another go when his voice healed. I almost was going to humour him, but I found an urn hidden under some floorboards that afternoon and whatever evils lurked within seemed to happy enough to catch a bit of sunlight for a change.
That’s a trap that people always fall for when they’re dealing with the paranormal, they always start when the sun sets. Why though? Why work when your tired, and the shadows mat the floor like one ominously large throw rug. The way that I see it, is that you’ll never meet a normal person after two a.m. so it’s only fair that you should expect the same of the dead.
It’s not just hauntings though, I always seem to get called in whenever the police get past their spooky limit: suspected aliens–its always kangaroos; Cryptozoological impossibilities–kangaroos again but occasionally wombats; and general other weirdness that I have to deal with.
Too many years ago now I was a normal detective, easy shifts and sometimes fulfilling the role of a parking inspector when I needed the OT, but somehow, the weird problems just kept finding me. Should the suburbs around Hornsby be abnormally haunted? Probably not, but by whatever quirk of fate that chose to mark me, I was left to a zero staff department that no one really knew existed, and that’s what I call good job security.
Michael Deflorrin was a puddle.
I don’t mean to be blunt, but I promise you a that full description of the state that Michael had found himself to inhabit that morning would put you off soup for a month.
Mr Deflorrin was a theoretical scientist, and as far as I could establish it appeared that he had been uniquely re-atomed.
I’m generally quite patient with the officers that call me in, it’s like a quick dance we always do before they’re comfortable that I’m not mad and that I can actually help. ‘Yes, you don’t trust my higglety pigglety witchcraft, yes you can keep dusting for fingerprints, hey you know what, this is a lovely crime scene that you’ve established, nice work with the blue and white tape.’
Luckily the officer and I had met before, unfortunate for him I imagine, but he greeted me with an air of cordiality that was ill-fitting for the proximity of the puddle that we now stood next to.
‘No sign of a struggle,’ the officer began, ‘he was baking some bread so we don’t belive that he planned for this to happen; few of the boys are going to start looking through his apartment again when they can find their stomachs.’
Noel?–I think it was Noel–smiled at me as I removed my glasses and shook his hand, ‘If there’s anything I can do, let me know,’ he said, ‘I’ve been stuck here saying “nothing to see here” to students for the last hour.’
I liked Noel, he had that unflappable detachment to alternate logic that made him a perfect bloke to bounce ideas off.
‘Did he have bones this morning,’ I asked taking a step back and subconsciously restraining my need to “kick the tyres” as it were.
‘As far as we can tell, Sir, is that he seemed to be working on some kind of teleportation device on account of the paperwork that we have managed to decipher,’ Noel gestured to a window some floors up, ‘It’s all just big words to me, but the title page says teleport schematics and I took the liberty to perform some deductive reasoning.’
It became readily apparent from Noel’s description of the morning that Mr Deflorrin had become the first man to successfully operate a full body teleportation array. It was also possible that he had achieved this with the dubious honour of being the first person to teleport somewhere without a destination in mind.
‘Officer, I think Mr. Deflorrin can wait here for a moment,’ I remarked, looking up and lamenting another day of paranormal obscurity, ‘we should head upstairs and have a look through his apartment though. I believe that there may be a skeleton in one of his closets.’
J.McCray
2021
Sunday Short Stories 