Tad Williams - A Stark And Wormy Knight

“It doesn’t count if nobody’s ever heard of them,” Liz said, pouting. She makes those grumpy-kid faces, you almost forget she could napalm a city block if the urge took her.

“But it does sound familiar,” said Ted. “Why is that?”

“Maybe you read the file,” I said, knowing he probably had. The kid studied up on me when he came here like a Yankees fan memorizing all the stats of his favorite player. When it came to me, he could tell you the BP|RD equivalent of my on-base percentage or average with runners in scoring position for every year of my career.

Hey, I said I didn’t care much about baseball, I didn’t say I didn’t know anything about it.

I looked at the two of them. They were waiting expectantly. “Crap,” I said. “We’re not going to play cards, are we?”

“Come on, tell about this Thursday guy,” Liz said. “If I know who he is, then maybe it’ll count for my list.”

“Wait, was that back in the 80s? The guy with the magical grandfather clock?” Ted said. “I think I remember…”

“Just shut up,” I suggested. “And keep it shut. I’m the one telling the story.”

It was the first time I’d been on the California coast above San Francisco. It’s interesting how quick you can go from a place packed with people and lights and car horns and things like that to the middle of nowhere. Once you get about an hour or so north of the Golden Gate Bridge, most of it’s like that — the kind of place where you realize you’ve been listening to the seagulls and the ocean all day and not much else. Or at least that’s how it was when I went to Monk’s Point back in early March of 1984. Maybe it’s different now.

Albie Bayless met me off the BPRD plane at Sonoma County Aiport. Bayless was a former reporter with the San Francisco Examiner who’d retired to his hometown a few years back and taken over the local shopper, the Monk’s Point Beacon. He’d had some past contact with the BPRD and me — you remember that Zodiac guy, the murderer everyone says he was never caught? No, nobody knows the BPRD had anything to do with that — I didn’t file an official report on that one. Probably never will. Anyway, when Bayless stumbled onto the weird death of Rufino Gentle and what happened after, he called my bosses at the bureau and suggested they send me out to have a look-see.

Bayless was wearing shorts and had grown a beard. He looked a good bit older and saggier than the last time I’d seen him, but I was there to work with him, not marry him. “Still got that bad sunburn, I see,” he said as I came down the ladder. Funny guy. I squeezed into the passenger seat of his car and he filled me in on details along the way. The town was called Monk’s Point because there used to be a Russian monastery out on the rocky headland overlooking a dent in the coastline called Caldo Bay. The population of monks had dwindled until the last of them went back to Russian at the end of the 19th century. Later the monastery was turned into a lighthouse when the Caldo Bay fishing industry hit its stride. Those glory days passed too, and the lighthouse was decommissioned in the 1960s. The property on the point now belonged to some out-of-town rich guy who hardly anybody ever saw. But the place itself had a bad reputation going back even before the Russians arrived. The local Indians had been a tribe called “Zegrado”, which, Bayless informed me cheerfully, was a corruption of the Spanish word for “cursed.”

As I discovered, “cursed” and “dying” were the two words that seemed to come up often in almost any conversation about Monk’s Point. The reasons became clear when we drove through the center of town, a handful of weathered plank buildings beside a tiny harbor at the mouth of a little dent in the coastline called Caldo Bay. There were half a dozen stores and a coffee shop and a bar, plus a few more places that looked like they’d been boarded up for a while. I doubt there were a thousand people in total living there. Things had gone downhill since the cannery closed. The town’s young people were leaving as soon as they were old enough, and except for Albie Bayless, no one was moving back in.

“Everybody always says the place is dying,” Bayless told me. “But they still get upset when someone actually dies — at least when there’s no good explanation for it. That’s what happened here last week. A kid named Gentle — Rufino Tamayo Gentle, how’s that for a name? — was out here with some friend. I guess Gentle and his buddies were troublemakers by small town standards, but nothing too bad, a couple of busts for pot and loitering, some suspicion of breaking into tourist’s cars. Anyway, on a bet, young Gentle climbed over the fence and went up to the famous haunted house. His friends waited for him. He never came back, never showed up for school. One of the kids mentioned it to a teacher. Result was, a local cop came by, cut off the bolt and walked up to the house. He found young Gentle standing on the front path, head slumped like he’d fallen asleep standing up. Body was stone cold — he’d been dead for hours.”

“Standing up?”

“That’s what the cop swears. He’s not the type to make things up, either.”

“You said one of the kid’s friends told a teacher. What about Gentle boy’s parents? Didn’t they notice he didn’t come back?”

Bayless smirked. “You’ll have to meet the kid’s dad. There’s a piece of work.”

“Okay,” I said, “‘dead standing up’ is definitely an interesting trick, but it isn’t why you called us, is it?”

“Nope. That would be ‘Rufino’s ‘Escape.’ But first I’m gonna take you to my place, get you some dinner.”

Just a half mile or so past the not-so-bustling downtown, Bayless pulled up to a gate across a private road. It was surrounded by weeds and sawgrass and looked like it didn’t get opened much. Beyond it a long, curving driveway led away toward the top of the hill. The house itself, the ex-monastery, was mostly hidden from view behind the headland, but the lighthouse loomed in clear view, pale as a mushroom. The windows at the top went all the way around, but the impression was nevertheless of someone looking away from you, staring out over the sea — someone you didn’t want to disturb, and not just out of courtesy.

“I don’t like it,” I said.

“You’re not alone,” said Bayless. “Nobody likes it. Nobody ever has. The local Indians hated the place. The monks only stayed about thirty years, then they all went back to Russia, saying the place was unholy. Even the guy who owns it now hardly ever shows up.”

Albie Bayless lived in a mobile home on the outskirts of town — not a trailer, but one of those things that look pretty much like a house with tin sides. He kept it up nice, and he wasn’t too bad a cook, either. As I listened to him I spooned up my bowl of chili. He made his with raisins and wild mushrooms, which actually worked out pretty good.

“The reason the dad didn’t report his son missing is that he’s a drunk,” Albie said. “Bobby Gentle. Supposedly an artist, but hasn’t sold anything that I know of. One of those ex-hippie types who moved here in the late sixties. Kid’s mother left about five or six years back. Sad.”

“But that’s not why you called us.”

“I’m coming to it. So they found the kid dead, like I told you. No question about it. No pulse, body cold. Took him to the local medical examiner over in Craneville and here’s the good part. The body got up off the examination table, sort of accidentally slugged the examiner — it was thrashing around a lot, I think — and escaped.”

“So he wasn’t actually dead.”

Albie fixed me with a significant look. “Think again, kimo sabe. This was after the autopsy.”