The Bone Bridge: Chapter 11

The Sheraton Massacre was also called “The Who’s Who Mass Suicide” by some of the national media but Hans Dietrich was also assembling a Who’s Who of his own. It wasn’t always easy getting the entities that he wanted and it usually required an invitation from the owner or proprietor of a haunted venue before they could go hunting. Plus, they preferred to get paid. Thanks to their publicity-shy benefactor, it wasn’t as if they needed the money but some transfer of cash for their services made their mission at least look legitimate and businesslike.

There were some ghosts that he still would’ve loved to have. The reasons for not getting such entities in his supernatural stable were various: Either they’d made their peace before being executed and weren’t available, the place they occupied wasn’t readily accessible, they simply didn’t wish to make appearances in our dimension or they were too damned slippery. Sometimes it was as if word got out what Dietrich had planned for them.

Maniacs such as Karl Panzram, Ted Bundy, Jack the Ripper and his personal favorites, countrymen Joseph Mengele and Peter Kurten, aka the Dusseldorf Ripper, forever eluded him for one reason or another. Luckily, the world always provided itself with a surfeit of killers and mass murderers.

There was one guy they’d captured six or seven years ago who still claims to this day to be Vlad the Impaler. Considering his alleged antiquity, there was no way to verify that but the results were stunning. Vlad was able to create momentarily solid objects such as petards or stakes literally out of thin air and he’d succeeded in actually impaling a couple of subjects in trial runs. That ability alone made him a very highly-prized asset. Even the multi-talented Mursi al Islamiyah hadn’t demonstrated such abilities.

As one could reasonably expect from someone possessed of such technology, there were a few professional torturers and mad doctors in the poisonous mix. While he may not have been able to obtain the services of Mengele, the Nazi “Angel of Death”, Dietrich and his team were able to get from the ruins at Buchenwald Mengele’s friend and colleague in the weird sciences Major Heinrich Jodl.

In some ways, Jodl was an even more impressive piece of work than Mengele, as his notorious reputation as a pioneer of modern-day vivisection attested. Jodl would prove to be especially useful in situations where there were to be Jews involved. Jodl, if anything, hated and feared Jews even moreso than Dietrich, which was saying something. When the battle-hardened Third Army stormed the prison and liberated it in April 1945, General "Blood and Guts" Patton himself had actually vomited when they saw the results of Jodl’s “work” in his laboratory. If he could manifest his old surgical tools, he’d almost be more valuable to Dietrich than Vlad. As it was, on test subjects, Jodl would burrow into a living person’s body and essentially turn them inside out as with his late colleague in that castle in Dublin, Ireland. Or, in one notable instance, Jodl had merely scrambled the subject’s insides without exposing the organs. It was refreshing to see a dedicated professional who wouldn’t let death put an end to his medical curiosity.

Mursi al Islamiyah also wasn’t his first terrorist acquisition. The one that had cost his team a member was Seamus Hannigan, a “Real IRA” bomber who had a flair for the dramatic. Hannigan was killed a few years ago trying to smuggle VX nerve agent out of the United States. Even though he was killed across the Atlantic, his ghost haunted the ruins of a castle in Dublin, for some unknown reason. Or it did until Dietrich and Associates, Inc. came visiting.

And then there was the usual garden variety of anonymous psychopaths who tended to be wannabes with limited skills but who were useful as infantrymen, shock troops. There was one from Cuba by way of Miami, a guy who claimed to be a torturer for Castro back in the early days before the Cuban dictator was forced to send him packing to Miami when his excesses were too egregious to ignore. That particular one was so violent, he was the one who got Dietrich to switch from one inch to three inch-thick glass when he actually cracked the first one. Moreso than anyone else, the bastard could draw, collect and expel more foot pounds of energy than anyone else in the Hole. While civilian ghost hunters are impressed with watching a child’s ball slightly rock back and forth, the torturer, nicknamed Dente Rojo or “Red Tooth” by fearful Cubans, once knocked two teeth out of a test subject’s head. It took him quite a while to recover, usually an hour or two, but if he knew where to strike in his one shot, it could easily prove fatal.

Now in his makeshift office in his makeshift warehouse, Dietrich opened a countersurveillance file on his second-hand metal desk and read the contents once again. The name of his pursuer had stuck out and after a little bit of research, Dietrich discovered that she was the granddaughter of the old fart who’d given him the technology that he was still using to this day!

It wasn’t so much the American agent whose intelligence agency had been investigating him and his activities for the past 25 months that intrigued him so much as her younger brother, someone who’d been hospitalized at around the same time as her agency began shadowing him.

This Adam Moss, aged 17, was treated for paranoid delusions. The little kike claimed to be a magnet for ghosts, an ability that Dietrich, who had to rely on heavy, cumbersome, expensive machinery, had no choice but to admire and envy. Covet, even.

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Another thing that sucks about being a magnet for ghosts- You can forget about your privacy. They’re there when you’re taking a whiz or a shit and forget about jerking off, which is my only damned sex life. Not that I’ve felt like it since Clarissa… since she left me. But I could feel the pressure start to build up. Sure, I’m busted up inside but I’m still a 17 year-old kid and still alive. I felt self-conscious about even shaking my dick after I peed. Come to think of it, maybe pulling my pud would help weed out some of the Victorian or uptight Republican assholes who every night came looking for favors like I was the Godfather on his daughter’s wedding day. Nah. Then I’d probably attract dead pervs, knowing my shitty luck.

Plus, my sister’s old room is next to mine and the walls in this house not only have ears, they have parabolic antennas. I was the most unfortunate kind of kid: One whose parents have an insanely active sex life. It’s no secret that I got my sex drive from both my folks and even though their room is all the way at the end of the hall, they’re both what you’d call loud and verbal in their throes of passion, which is about six nights a week. They cut me a break after I came home from the hospital both times but I guess Mom and Dad felt the pressure building up, too. And my Jewish mother wonders why I’m so thin. It’s not so much her crappy cooking or my adolescent metabolism: It’s the fact that their sex life is ruining my appetite.

All the same, I found myself seeking the company of people that I knew were alive and kicking, even my oversexed parents. That’s especially true of my sister. Since Laura and I became young adults, we kept the fighting to a bare minimum and I even began thinking she was cool, after all. I had no idea how long she’d be home but I found myself dreading the day she’d finally pack up and leave again for Katmandu or whatever Godforsaken place her boss would send her.

I bugged her for more info on this Blood character but for some reason, she wasn’t very generous in the detail department. I think the biggest reason why I stalled about meeting him wasn’t so much that I was scared of him (although I was) as my knowing that Laura wouldn’t move out until I saw him. Yeah, I love my big sister. Fucking sue me.

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When I called Laura Moss to give her some startling autopsy results, she gave me some startling news of her own: Her poor kid brother Adam had been readmitted to the hospital, this time to the nut house. I had to restrain myself from visiting him. One, I didn’t want to interrupt his therapy, however useless I was convinced it would be; Two, I didn’t want to remind him any more of his dead girlfriend than I already did and, Three, I didn’t want to come off looking like I was grilling him for more info. Which of course, I would’ve, albeit delicately.

My heart went out to the poor kid, especially after I found out from Laura that he was being visited by so many ghosts it eventually landed him back in the Napoleon Finishing School. I couldn’t help but wonder- Even though the boy was trying his best to screen out as many of those ghosts as possible, how many of them were victims of the mass suicide at the Sheraton and were trying to tell him what exactly happened?

Luckily, we get our information from the living, such as the strangely morbid but competent folks at the Essex County Coroner’s Office. Like I told Laura Moss, the traumatic deceleration of some of the street level victims temporarily masked puncture wounds. They were holes made in the body that didn’t yield any forensic evidence of a weapon. For instance, a person pierced with a sword or knife would offer some residue, according to Locard’s Exchange Principle. There would be some microscopic flakes of metal in the wound and wound channel.

Not this time, apparently. It was as if they were pierced with a ghostly weapon or a very, very sharp icicle. I began wondering if some of them were stabbed and pushed out the window after being chased all around the next-to-top story. Christ, what a way to go. To add insult to injury to our powers of ratiocination, free histamine and other tests conclusively proved that the wounds were made perimortem, or at the point of death. This was shaping up to be a classic case of knowing less and less as more and more information came in.

I quietly decided it may be a good idea to pay Adam another visit soon, after all, especially since Laura said he was discharged and came back home.

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I feel pretty confident when I say that I’m probably the only dude in human history that got his cherry popped by a ghost.

Now, what I’m about to say will sound like something written for Penthouse’s letters to the editor but I have no reason to lie to you. This is how I lost my virginity to Clarissa a week or so after she passed away.

I just got out of the shower last night and my room was empty. A week ago, that wouldn’t have been unusual but since I came back from the hospital the first time, my bedroom’s been like Grand Central fucking Station for every ghost on the planet. Last night was different and, while I welcomed getting my space back, I was also wondering what was going on. Maybe they found some other medium, a real one, who would be more accommodating and didn’t mind having their privacy ripped off.

I took advantage of the rare chance to get undressed without being gawked at by dead people and took off the dirty clothes that I pulled back on when I first got out of the shower. So I was standing naked in front of my dresser pulling out a pair of flannel pajama bottoms when I saw Clarissa in the mirror.

Yeah, just like in about a hundred horror movies. Sometimes it happens for real. I whipped around and she was gone. My heart sank down to my knees. Maybe I was crazy, after all. I couldn’t believe that Clarissa would pop in for the first time since I came out of my coma just to disappear. Or maybe she couldn’t control it. Maybe she was still getting the hang of manifesting. So I called out her name. Nothing. Nada. So I called out to her again and this time she began materializing to my left.

First I saw the outline of her head and one of her shoulders. Then I could make out the perfect ponytail she wore on our last night together. Pretty soon, she was full bodied and was even beginning to show some color. She almost looked real. Too real. Her wounds were coming out, too, and I reached out and touched them.

Hugging her was like hugging a solid draft but I didn’t care. I began crying and even though I could feel her body, even her clothes, my tears dropped through her shoulder and landed on the floor.

“Where were you?” I asked. “God, I can’t tell you how much I missed you, baby.”

She smiled in response and looked like she wanted to say something back but didn’t think it was worth trying. I didn’t mind continuing the conversation for both of us. I figured, the longer I talked to her, maybe the longer she’d stay.

“Just when you were alive, when you were the only girl I wanted to hang with, you’re the only ghost I want to see.” It sounded great in my head but came out sounding like dog shit when it came out of my mouth but her sweet smile showed that she knew what I meant. She put her lips over mine, even inserting her tongue into my mouth. It was almost like sucking on an ice cube but I still didn’t care. A cold Clarissa was still a damned sight better than the hottest ghost, if there’s any such thing. Her clothes melted away from her and she, too, was naked. It was, obviously, the first time I’d ever seen her bod and even as a ghost, she was still smoking hot. I couldn’t believe I was getting hard as a rock over a dead girl.

I touched her wounds again and noticed that she’d somehow fixed her neck. So I asked her, “Think you can do something about these?” She frowned for a minute and put some effort into it and it somewhat worked. Her injuries began to fade in and out like her concentration wasn’t quite there.

Then she did something I never thought possible. She took my penis, spread her thighs and took me inside of her. Since she was almost my height, we didn’t have any problem doing it standing up. I had no idea what a vagina felt like, of course, but somehow I didn’t imagine that it would’ve felt the way it did. It was like making love with silk or satin. It felt cool and slick to my penis instead of warm and wet. I whispered into her ear, “I always wanted to tell you I love you but I was afraid. I was afraid you’d tell me you didn’t want to fuck up our friendship.” She hugged me tighter with one arm and pulled me deeper inside of her by grabbing my ass with her other arm.

It suddenly occurred to me that maybe she was able to tell the other ghosts to beat it for the night, that we had some important business to attend to.

“Did you tell the others to stop coming around and bothering me?” She smiled and nodded her head. “You can communicate with them, too?” She smiled and nodded again. Her ponytail moved as if in slow motion.

I smoothed her cornsilk-soft hair, gently grabbing her ponytail as my thrusts got faster and faster. I kissed her cool lips as I came and I saw the most amazing fucking thing- She was starting to turn transparent again and my spunk was hanging in midair where her vagina would be. I grabbed her shoulders and begged her to stay and finally she disappeared. My big blob of semen suddenly lost its shape, dropped and landed wetly on the hardwood floor. If I didn’t already start crying over losing her again, I would’ve wondered like I did later if I was still technically a virgin.

But I just stood there looking at my wad on the floor, crying like a fucking idiot. If this is what it’s like being alive, I thought, then being dead for all eternity with Clarissa was looking a fuck of a lot better than the alternative.

After I cleaned up, I pulled my pajama bottom on and looked at my clock. It was five minutes after midnight. It was officially my 18th birthday. Clarissa remembered.