Criminal Macabre: The Complete Cal McDonald Stories (Second Edition)

by Steve Niles

Genres: General Fiction; Horror; Mystery

Synopsis

The complete collection of Criminal Macabre prose stories by Steve Niles (30 Days of Night) featuring two brand new tales and an introduction by horror legend John Carpenter!
 

The world has two faces. The natural and the supernatural. The face we see every day, people filing past us in an almost zombie-like stupor, numb to the horrors of everyday life or driven to madness by the pain and agony of modern-day existence. And those are the people who aren't zombies or monsters!

Cal McDonald is a detective with one foot in the real world, and one in the world of magic. For Cal, the horrors we all dream about in the fevered darkness of the night are all-too real, kept at bay through an almost constant influx of drugs to numb the pain, but never erase it. Cut from the same mold as Sam Spade, Jake Gittes, and the famous detectives of Chandler, Hammett and Spillane, Cal McDonald, whether he likes it or not, is all that stands between us and the nightmare world just outside our vision.
 
Collects the complete Criminal Macabre prose stories Savage Membrane; Guns, Drugs, and Monsters; Dial M for Monster, All My Bloody Things, and two new prose stories: The Dead Son and Out of Water.
 

Release date: May 3, 2022

Publisher: Dark Horse Books

Print pages: 472

Sample

1

It was the night after Halloween. I had vague memories of crashing a costume party with a couple of ghouls I know. I started drinking. After that I draw a blank, but I’m sure there was trouble—there always is. Besides, I could feel a hell of a fat lip throbbing and my hands were cut and bruised with the unmistakable indentations of human teeth across my knuckles. I’d hit somebody and somebody had hit back. That didn’t bother me so much. I was always hitting and getting hit. What I found disturbing was my empty shoulder holster. My .38 was gone.

I was face-down in my apartment, experimenting with the adhesive properties of vomit to hardwood floors, when, of course, the phone rang. It sounded like a hammer against a steel barrel inside my skull. I groaned and peeled my head from the floorboards. My stomach lurched. It didn’t like the idea of being moved very much but the phone was ringing incessantly. It was six at night so I had to get up anyway, but I didn’t like being nagged. Wiping my face with one hand, I snatched the receiver violently from the cradle, choking the brain-rattling ring in half.

“McDonald Investigations. What d’you want?” I barked. My voice was gravel and phlegm.

The voice on the other end blurted, “Cal. I got something down here you might want to see.”

It was Blout. Jefferson Blout is a big, bad-ass cop from the precinct I worked in for all of a year. That is, before I was asked to leave as a result of a drug test. Evidently traces of alcohol, marijuana, and crank were found in my blood. Traces, hell! At that time I was practically sweating the stuff. They didn’t need to check my blood, they could’ve just sucked on my arm.

Blout stuck by me when everyone else on the force turned their backs. He knew why I did all the drugs, and why I still do sometimes. He knows what these eyes see. Christ. Believe me, if every time you turned around some fucked-up monster was coming down on you, you’d stay wasted too.

You see, I have this knack. Call it power, talent, what you like. I call it a curse. A fucking pain in the ass.

It’s like this. Some people attract love or money and some—I think I’m one of the few—attract the bizarre. Always have, ever since I was an eight-year-old kid living in the ’burbs. That’s when I found my first corpse.

I’d been tooling around the woods, playing with sticks and crap, when I came over an embankment near the creek that ran parallel with my house. There it was, tucked in the mud and leaves like a big, naked pea pod. I saw its feet first, then the torso. And that was all, because that’s all there was. It was headless.

Maybe that was when things clicked, when my fate was set in stone. I wasn’t scared, though—more like enthralled, so much so that I didn’t bother to call the cops for over an hour. All I could do was think about the headless man. Who was he? Who killed him? And why had they taken his head?

Somehow, I knew instinctively that the head wasn’t in the area, and when the cops arrived I told them my theory. They laughed, patted me on the head, and said I’d make a great detective.

That pretty much set the tone for the rest of my life: bizarre crimes, laughing cops, and me in the middle. Like I said, I’m a magnet for the weird, so I did what the cops told me all those years ago and became a detective. Now I really get on their nerves.

Anyway, Blout’s supported me, helping with cases and sometimes with bail. I’ve tried to return the favor whenever something strange comes along that normal police investigations and procedures can’t touch. And believe me, they hate to admit when they need help—especially from the likes of me.

There was this case a few years back where body parts of young boys and girls were being found all over the place—tragic, but not altogether uncommon. What was odd was that the limbs and other body parts hadn’t been crudely chopped off, the norm in a hack-and-slash case. Instead, they were removed with almost surgical precision. The killer took his time with these kids, lots of time. Even weirder, the parts were rubbed with strange oils and exotic herbs. The cops waited almost six months before they came to me. If not for Blout’s insistence, they may never have.

Once they showed me everything, I knew immediately that we were dealing with something of voodoo origin. The herbs and oils were commonplace in Haiti and New Orleans, even certain parts of New York. But the accuracy behind the removal of the limbs had me stumped until a day or so later. I was walking through an alley on the way to the corner liquor store, when I spotted an illegal chop shop—a garage where stolen cars are cut up for parts. It hit me like a ton of bricks, or better, a ton of bloody body parts.

I suggested the cops check the Feds’ files for plastic or transplant surgeons of Haitian descent from the New Orleans area that had been fired in the past five years and had relocated to the Washington D.C. Metropolitan area. Second—and this even creeped me out—hit the files for stalking investigations on the Internet, specifically cases involving adults seeking teenagers.

On a hunch, I told them to check out a guy I’d seen on the news, name of Francis Lazar. He headed an organization that actually believed young children, and I mean young, were capable of consenting to physical relationships with adult men. The organization was called ManChildLove. I remember when I saw Lazar on CNN I quickly lost track of what he was talking about and concentrated on his eyes. In them I saw mania. The guy was a sick, twisted freak hiding behind his rhetoric.

Bottom line, boys: keep your eyes peeled for one or two twisted fucks with a penchant for teens, home surgery, and voodoo.

Sure enough, everything I told them involving the case fell into place. The cops, with the help of the Feds (who love to come in right at the end), located one Dr. Polynice, formally of New Orleans and fired from his post for “unusual practices with cadavers.” In his basement, the authorities discovered the good doctor’s very own teenage chop shop and Voodoo Lounge. After checking phone and mail records, it was found that the doctor had been shipping large crates all over the States. Before each shipment, a call was made from the doctor to MCL spokesman Francis Lazar.

Connection made, target hit. Bull’s-eye. Dr. Polynice’s network was collecting innocent teenagers, murdering them, rearranging their body parts into unidentifiable corpses, and reanimating the patchwork cadavers with forgotten voodoo zombie rituals. And it gets worse, if that’s possible. The bastards were selling the jigsaw kiddies to ManChildLove members. What those twisted pricks did with them I’ll leave to your imagination.

After the cops had jerked around for six months because they couldn’t stretch beyond their own perception of the world, it took me less than a week to solve the case. How many kids could’ve been saved if they’d called me sooner? That’s the question I couldn’t shake.

In the end, more than sixty people were arrested from D.C. to San Diego, charged with crimes ranging from murder to kidnapping to necrophilia. Arrested were members of MCL, lonely, disturbed women, and one or two well meaning but extremely misguided couples unable to adopt or procreate.

Throughout the trial, the subject of reanimation was never brought up, nor were the zombie teens ever shown, talked about, or presented as evidence. They just disappeared, victims for all time. Nobody wants to believe in Frankenstein, but they will believe that someone mail-ordered corpses for sex.

Soon as I heard Blout on the phone this time, I knew something strange was happening. Something the cops couldn’t handle using conventional methods.

“What is it? Emergency? ’Cause if it ain’t, I got a lot of throwing up to do.”

Blout laughed. “Yeah, I heard about last night.”

I didn’t want to let on I had no idea what happened at the Halloween party, so I returned the laugh and said, “It was a great party. I had a good time.” I laughed again. It was one chuckle too many.

“You have no idea what happened last night, do you?”

I paused as long as I could. “No.”

There was an awkward silence that happens every time Blout and I come too close to personal talk. He went on.

“You going to come down here or not?!”

I belched. Bile boiled in my throat. “Yeah, yeah, give me a couple minutes to clean up.”

“Please do.”

He hung up before I could retort. Bastard.

2

I took off my filthy clothes and used them to wipe up the area where I slept, then threw them out the window into the alley. It would be easier to get new stuff than to pay to have vomit, blood, and God knows what else cleaned out of them. I drew all the shades, lit a smoke, and strutted around the apartment naked until I found myself standing in front of my half shattered, full-length mirror. It’d been a long time since I’d looked at myself. What a mess; a maze of scars covered my body. I looked like a scarification fanatic, except they do it on purpose. I got mine quite unwillingly, the result of years and years of getting the shit kicked out of me.

I shook my head. Only thirty years old but you’d think I was in my late forties. Christ, fifties even! Standing there naked, I realized I looked as much like a monster as any I’d fought. I laughed a breathy, gasping-for-air laugh. Yeah, fucking hysterical.

I turned toward my trash-covered desk, head pounding. My guts were twisting so I pulled open the bottom drawer where a bottle of Jim Beam greeted me. It went down hard and connected with the craving in my bloodstream, making me queasy. The sick retreated before I returned the bottle to the drawer. Hair of the dog wins another in a long series of battles.

Kicking a trail through ankle-deep trash, I made my way to the bathroom, figuring I could catch a quick shower and shave and get down to the station within a half hour.

Just then I heard a sound from the other side of the shower curtain. Someone (or something) had shifted. I reached for my gun, but all I got was a handful of armpit. I had no weapon and I was naked, so I began to ease out of the room.

The curtain flew open and I screamed. A huge, dark figure stood in my tub.

“Ahhhhh!”

“Hey Cal, when did you wake up?”

It was Mo’Lock; sometime partner, reluctant friend, full-time ghoul. A ghoul of the lurking variety. My heart was pounding so hard I thought for sure I would die right then and there.

Yeah, I see all sorts of shit. Ghouls are actually one of the more common monsters around. They can be found all over the world, mostly in urban areas. They are the purest form of the undead, and actually the most harmless. Way back in the Middle Ages, ghouls were known for eating flesh and lurking in graveyards, but they came into their own around the turn of the century when they realized they didn’t need flesh or blood to survive.

While the world was living through an industrial revolution, ghouls began a revolution of self-discovery. They were dead, cursed to live forever in a twisted form of their former human self, but they didn’t need anything to survive. They made peace with the human race and began a hundred-year process of acclimating themselves into human society.

These days you can find ghouls everywhere. They tend to favor service industry jobs because they like the hours. Next time you pass a road crew, take a second look. I guarantee there’s a ghoul among them. The same goes for postal workers and a wide range of people you probably never look at twice. Most people would be surprised how often they’re in contact with the dead. All in all, ghouls are pretty low maintenance—that makes them all right in my book.

I met Mo’Lock on one of my earliest cases and he’s been glued to me since. He has an annoying habit of creeping around, but I can’t get too mad. That would be like blaming a cat for being hairy.

A slit of a grin appeared on his stark-white, bony face. “You forgot I was here, didn’t you?” He looked a little too pleased with himself.

I took a deep breath. “Get the hell out of my bathroom. I got a call from Blout. Something’s up.”

The ghoul stepped out of the tub with long, sweeping, puppet-like motions. Two strides and he was standing outside the bathroom facing me. He looked me up and down like a ten-cent peepshow.

“Do you know you’re naked?” He seemed to be genuinely concerned.

I slammed the door in his face. It hit him, and he fell to the floor cursing. He was very tall and thin, like a bone rail. Getting himself off the ground was a major pain. Teach his dead ass to mess with me. Maybe it would be a good day after all.

I showered, shat, shaved, and dressed before returning to my desk, where the ghoul was emptying his pockets onto the blotter: mace, a lock-blade knife, handcuffs, and a pair of short spiked steel knuckles—an inexpensive, but nasty cousin of the brass knuckle—covered the stained desktop.

“Hey, don’t go dumping your shit on my desk!”

“This is your ‘shit.’ I took it from you at the party after your episode with the alien,” he said, “Besides, I do not have any ‘shit.’”

He wanted me to see the bloody smashed mess the door had made of his nose, but I just stared at him. His busted nose wasn’t any big deal, it’d heal before we got to the precinct. The undead have amazing healing capabilities. He just wanted some easy sympathy.

“Officer Blout called again while you were in the shower. I took a message,” Mo’Lock said as he lifted a piece of paper off the desk. “He said, ‘If you don’t get your fat, lazy-fuck, bastard-self down to the station immediately, you can kiss my black ass.’”

I loaded the stuff Mo’Lock had been holding for me into my pockets. Six-thirty pm and I was ready to start my day. When I headed for the door, Mo’Lock lumbered behind me. I stopped.

“You coming?”

“Do you mind?”

“No, not at all. You got cash?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s grab a cab.”

The ride to the station was the usual bit of the bizarre that I’ve come to expect. The driver was of Mo’Lock’s ilk, and the two of them gabbed on and on in a tongue that sounded foreign, but was simply regular English spoken at unbelievable speed. It’s fascinating for about thirty seconds, then it works your nerves to blunt nubs. Moments like these made me wonder what the hell I was doing riding in a cab with a couple of the living dead. It was the eternal question—why me?

3

As a rule, I detest police departments, but I really hate my old precinct. Aside from the stares and nasty comments thrown my way as I pass, the place has a smell that sets my memory reeling. Walking the halls, I’m always reminded of the worst times.

The year I graduated from the academy, for instance, was a long, shit-pile of a year. I became a cop, then lost my family and nearly my mind. In the space of twelve months, my mother and younger sister were killed by a drunk driver and my father, Ben McDonald, went berserk and cut the driver’s throat outside the courtroom. As usual, I couldn’t do a damn thing about it because I was so loaded on smack.

My father was charged and he responded by hanging himself the night before his hearing. I discovered the body. I’ll never forget the image of his corpse swinging back and forth, the sound of the rope creaking against the rafter beam, rhythmic and maddening.

All my life I tried my damnedest to be normal. I ignored the dark fringes of the world that crept toward me and if something got too close, I stomped it dead and turned my back like nothing had ever happened. Monsters? Nope, didn’t see them. Werewolves, aliens, demons, and freaks? Just keep on walking. Don’t look.

The police academy was an attempt at normal existence, but even there I should have known it would be impossible. I could never hide or live a normal life. No matter how hard I try, I always seem to land right in the middle of Freak Central.

The academy was no exception.

It turned out that the place was built on a goddamn burial ground. Of course, the dead decided to have their revenge the week I arrived. It was a bloodbath of possession, sacrifice, and the living dead. I don’t mean living dead like Mo’Lock, soulless ghouls who can function and think; these sons-a-bitches were mindless, kill-crazy zombies.

The place turned upside down. Everyone panicked except me. The one benefit of my life is that I’m never surprised. I’ve had the crap scared out of me a few times, but I never panic. That day, I fought my way through the relentless invasion until I reached the little room used as the parish. I convinced the priest, who I found hiding in his confessional, to follow me to the basement where I told him to bless the water main. It took some convincing, and a slap or two, but eventually he agreed.

It was in the bag. I manned one of those riot control hoses and hosed the place down with a half million gallons of high-octane Holy Water. The dead and possessed withered and melted, screamed, and let loose the innocent. In the end, only a few dozen were dead and nobody except me and the priest knew what happened. Well, at least that was the official stand. The academy closed and moved to a new location a year later. Chickenshits.

Still, I refused to give in, to acknowledge the supernatural regions of life. To hide, I took more and more drugs, more and more drink, anything to blur my vision or dull my senses. It was a miracle I lived, let alone graduated. But I did, and everything was going great for awhile. I even made the effort and kicked drugs. It was hard, very hard, and not just because of my physical and emotional addictions. The more I stayed sober, the more horror I saw: strange things peering around corners, voices whispering in my ear in the dark. But I had to make an effort, had to make some sort of a stand against the darkness that threatened to overtake me.

I was absolutely straight the day of my graduation from the academy. My family was there (it would be several weeks until the drunk driver entered our lives) and though nobody said it outright, especially my dad, I knew they were proud.

At one point he caught me alone near a crowd of rowdy graduates. He shook my hand and in a very low tone said, “You look good, son. Nice job.”

He used the pretense of the graduation to congratulate me on kicking drugs, but it was better than nothing. Then in the crowd I saw a stranger moving quickly through the crush. He moved with a confidence you don’t see in a normal person. I couldn’t take my eyes off him, even though my father was talking to me. He broke through the crowd, and as he passed he looked at me and raised his hand. Then I saw his palm and the strange scar burned into its center. A pentagram, the mark of the beast. I started to go after him, but stopped. I wasn’t going to give in. The darkness would not consume me. I forced myself to look away. When I looked back, the stranger had disappeared into the throng of graduates.

That night I had dinner with my parents. I stayed sober despite the sight of the man in the crowd. It had been eating at me all night, though, because he seemed to take pleasure in taunting me. I knew what the man really was—a pentagram on the palm was the sign of the werewolf.

The dinner was nice despite my preoccupation. They were happy about me becoming a police officer and my newfound sobriety. Nobody said it in so many words, or any words at all, but they buzzed around, smiling at nothing, and there was a general air of peace that had been absent for a long time. My little sister Stephie suckered me into some Nintendo after dinner and we wound up playing for hours. Finally, after I’d received countless ass-kickings, my dad asked that we turn off the game so he could see the news. I pretended to be disappointed, but it was a relief.

Everything came crashing down when the television flickered to life. The lead story on the news was a gruesome, extremely bloody multiple murder. To our horror, we found out the murders had happened nearby. A family was having a small party celebrating their daughter’s graduation from the academy. Details were sparse, but at some point the party came under attack—twelve people were slaughtered.

My stomach began to tighten. I needed a drink, a pill, something. Anything to stop the feeling rushing over me.

“. . . details are sketchy but police are telling us that this shocking tragedy seems to be the result of some sort of . . . animal attack.”

I was numb, sick. I felt responsible for the deaths. I’d had the killer in my sights and let him go.

I suddenly felt panicked and had to get out of that house. I hastily thanked my mom for the dinner as the whole family pleaded that I stay. I remember looking back as I got into my car and seeing my parents standing in the doorway. They weren’t waving. They just stood there watching me, knowing I was about to leap off the wagon. They were right—I went on a binge that would’ve shamed Keith Richards.

It did the trick. I felt nothing but the buzz of alcohol and painkillers in my system. Above all, I saw nothing.

Three weeks later, a drunk driver took most of my family. After that, and after I found my dad swinging by his throat, I was gone. I remember nothing from the last half of my year as a cop save for loads of crushing pain. It was then that I faced my fate, spit on it, and kicked it in the balls.

I was so much of a mess that my sergeant demanded I take a drug test. The results were bad. They didn’t just ask me to leave the force, they kicked my butt and threw me bodily from the station.

It was the final straw. Still, I didn’t care. I laid in the gutter until I had the strength to stagger to a liquor store. I was beaten down, twitchy, and paranoid. Faces stared, some dumbly, some seemingly loaded with malice. I had lost it all. Soon I would come apart at the seams, or if I was lucky, just collapse and die.

Then it happened. I was walking, swigging rotgut, alongside a small shadowy park off Fifteenth Street, just short of Mount Pleasant. It was a dark moonless night, yet when I glared into the park I could see clear as day. I saw the figure of a man looming over a woman. At first I thought they were making out, and I began to turn away to get back to feeling sorry for myself. Then I saw the moist glimmer of fangs.

Vampire.

I tossed the bottle, smiled, and cracked my knuckles.

I ran into that park feeling every ounce of the pain in my chest, every loss I’d suffered, and most of all, the hatred I felt for the horrible luck I had. I channeled the rage into my body, feeling strong, sober, and clear-headed. In reality, I was out of control, drunk, and over-confident.

I attacked the vampire with such ferocity that the bloodsucker seemed frightened and tried to get away. From me, a mere human! In that moment, I gave up trying to run away. If the dark wanted me, it had me.

I ripped the head from the vampire’s shoulders with my bare hands, pissing on the fate that was handed to me. This was my life. I had arrived.

And that, to make a short story long, is why I hate going to the precinct. It reminds me of my family and the sorry state of my life.

 

 

Blout was waiting for us outside the door of the coroner’s lab, chewing on a big sloppy cigar. Normally I dislike cigar smokers, but he pulled it off. Blout was a large, wide-framed black man in his early forties, very dark and tall. In fact, he was almost as tall as Mo’Lock. He always wore dark suits that made him all the more imposing, making me feel small and unimportant in his shadow.

He looked pissed—pretty much his natural state—and none too pleased that I’d brought the ghoul along. Nobody could quite figure out who or what Mo’Lock was. He definitely made humans uneasy, but he always wore a suit and tie, so they assumed he was okay. Funny what you can pull off with a decent suit.

Blout stood up and looked straight into my eyes. Mo’Lock was ignored with clear, obvious disdain.

“What’d you bring him for?” Blout asked in his low, rumbling voice. He stood close. I could smell the minty stink of his menthol shaving cream and the fast food taco he’d had for lunch.

I shrugged. “He’s my assistant. Might be able to help.”

Blout shoved a big finger close to my nose. “Just keep him the fuck away from me. Got it?”

I showed him two palms. “Okay, no sweat. What’ve you got?”

Blout bobbed his head sideways, indicating the door of the coroner’s lab.

“In here.”

The lab was cramped, bare of equipment, and dark. There were only two lights—a small desk lamp and a bare bulb dangling above the examination table in the center of the room.

There was a body on the table, head and chest cut open. The scalp had been sliced, and the flesh from the top of the head peeled like an orange. The face of the dead man was wrinkled and folded down over itself. It would have been comical if it weren’t so disgusting. The ribs were sawed clean away so there was a tidy viewing window to examine the cavity. I could see the internal organs had already been removed for examination. The heart and liver were in steel trays and next to them was an array of bloody saws and surgical tools. An autopsy had recently been completed.

I stepped up to the table. The body was male. By the looks of his overgrown hair and the haggard, leathery look of his skin, I assumed he was homeless. That is, of course, when he was alive. He was dead now. Homeless and lifeless, what a raw deal.

Mo’Lock stayed behind me, close to the exit, but slowly edged toward the corner where there was the least amount of light. Blout moved to the other side of the table. He looked down at the body and sighed. He didn’t have much of a stomach for an experienced cop. When he looked up at me I was screwing a cigarette into my mouth. His expression went from disgust to irritation.

“Don’t smoke in here, Cal. Christ, you know better.”

I put my lighter back, leaving the unlit cigarette in my mouth. “Yeah, I wouldn’t want to give the stiff cancer,” I said. “What’s the story?”

“John Doe, homeless. He was found last night stuffed in a drainage pipe that used to dump into the old reservoir near the D.C./Maryland border.”

I could see no reason why I was needed. Dead bums weren’t my forté, and not the least bit strange. I chewed on the unlit cigarette like a piece of beef jerky. “What’s the cause of death?”

Blout smirked. He thought he had one on me, as though the answer were so clear, so obvious. “Try opening your fucking eyes. You notice anything missing?”

I scanned the body again, stopping at the head. I leaned down and squinted into the open skull. Inside it was a clean white, as though the cavity had been scrubbed and bleached.

“I’ll be damned,” I said, and stood up straight.

“You see why I wanted you to come down.”

From the other side of the room, Mo’Lock emerged from the shadows.

“What is it?”

Blout and I spoke at the same time.

“No brain.”

The autopsy was conclusive: the skull was completely empty. There was no blood, no gray matter, and x-rays showed there were no breaks in the skull whatsoever. The brain stem was there, untouched, as though there had never been anything attached to it. The official coroner’s report called it brain death, but isn’t brain death when you’re still alive but a vegetable? How can something that isn’t there be the cause of death? I’d like someone to explain that one.

The strange thing was, I’d seen this before. Blout knew it.

“Remind you of anything, Cal?”

I nodded. This time Blout kept his mouth shut.

Mo’Lock walked right up to the table. He stood so close I could feel the cold of his flesh, his annoyance evident. “Excuse me, but I’d like to know what’s going on.”

I was staring at the floor, my head swimming in watery visions of distant memories.