NOIR- vember _ MISS FROM THE ABYSS

 My first NOIR-vember tale focuses on another WWII veteran, a sociopathic O.S.S. agent who quotes the stoics and others for a roadmap for his actions.

MISS FROM THE ABYSS

“The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?”

- Edgar Allan Poe

 

Our visitor to the movie set studied me as I studied her. I don’t know what she learned. I learned more than I wanted.

The willowy redhead cast no shadow.

Once, that would have shaken me. But the War killed a lot of things … like the illusion that life made sense.

Now, I took the day as it came and survived as best I could.

I did survive. So did Mitchell Mack beside me.

Ingrid, of the woodfire soul and smoky eyes, did not.

No, I take it back. I didn’t survive. Since she died in my arms, I had only been going through the motions.

The woman who was not a woman had an impassive face.

 It reminded me of what an ancient Greek statue must have looked like when first sculpted: cold, beautiful, impersonal … there was nothing to it that spoke of a soul beneath.

I thought of what Poe once wrote: “There is no beauty without some strangeness.”

But, then, what did he know? He was an opium addict.

Mitchell Mack, the only one of my O.S.S. team to survive the war, noted the absence of her shadow.

He grimaced, “Luke, you want I should cork her?”

She sneered, “As if you could, Pict.”

Yes, he was short. But he could whip his weight in Polar Bears … which meant he was hell on arctic cubs.

Cecil D, DeMille, a scowl deepening the lines of his face, carefully took off his spectacles … when you were as important as he was, your glasses were called spectacles.

He approached my corner table on the set. “Is my guillotine ready, Mr. Lucas?”

“I’m putting the finishing touches on it tonight.”

“Excellent. Then, you may go off with your lovely fr ….”

He stopped upon seeing her lack of a shadow. “As you can see for yourself, Director DeMille. She is no one’s friend … not even her own.”

Her supple back straightened. “I beg your pardon!”

“You don’t have it. You are a slave … probably to something vaguely female to think sending an attractive whatever you are will succeed in snaring a male.”

Her ethereal face just then reminded me of something Wallace Stephens once wrote:

“I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw or heard or felt came not but from myself; And there I found myself more truly and more strange.”

I sneered at myself. It was obvious that I had been hit on the head too many times in the war.

She hissed, “Hybla is no Something but a goddess!”

I chided myself. I was off my game. She was no servant. She was the master off slumming in some mischief.

“Mother of Monsters you mean,” snorted Mitchell Mack. “Me and Luke scurried about the mountains of Sicily for a time. We heard about your Hybla breaking loose from the underworld, screaming to kill some Captain Blaine.”

The demon turned to me. “You were a captain in the last war. Do you know where this Captain Blaine may be found?”

I murmured, “What is divinity if it can come only in silent shadows and in dreams?”

“What?” she snapped.

I sighed, “There were a lot of captains in the war, ma’am. We were all hardly on a first name basis.”

She gave me a haughty smile as if she had just drawn the fourth Ace.

“But only one who is to work for the singer Perry Como this weekend on another of his cross-country radio show flights.”

I sighed. That was another clue that I was getting sloppy in my life. 

With the number of enemies I had, you had to keep things close to the vest to keep on living.

That this demon knew this much about my schedule meant I was putting Mitchell Mack at risk. 

Unacceptable.

This April 5th, Mitchell Mack and I had been the studio technicians on his Chesterfield Supper Club which took place 20,000 feet in the air. 

It had been the first known instance of a complete radio show being presented from an airplane. Perry, Jo Staffer, the Lloyd Shaffer Orchestra and the entire "Supper Club" crew made the flights for the show.

There were two "Supper Club" broadcast flights that evening: at 6 PM and again at 10 PM for the West Coast broadcast of the show. A total of three flights were made that day since there was an earlier rehearsal flight for reception purposes.

“Perry is a good man. Me and Mitchell Mack haven’t met many of those.”

The Fairbairn-Sykes knife, that former teammate Darael made for me from the heart of a cooled meteor, burned in its ankle sheath.

It only did that in the presence of utter evil. Good … and bad. Utter evil was damned hard to kill.

But, then, so was I.

“Mitchell Mack, you sit this one out.”

“Like hell! We go down together, or we beat the odds together. But it’s together, Luke.”

I nodded, knowing a losing fight when I heard it, and turned to Hybla as I now knew her to be.

I turned to her. “Take me to where you shang-haied him. I’ll talk sense to your Hybla.”

“And if she doesn’t listen?”

“Then, I’ll talk death. I figure the two of us are quite fluent in that.”

Mitchell Mack whispered, “Luke, you and me ain’t going to Heaven after all we done. You die; you won’t go to where Ingrid ended up.”

“No, but I won’t be mourning her here.”

My luck, I would survive this. Then, maybe I’d live so long that I’d forget her. Maybe I’d die trying.

Hybla flashed that beauty queen smile, all teeth and no heart, “After me, gentlemen. I promise not to hurt you ... much.”

Mitchell Mack grunted, "Tell that to your eyes, sister."

I followed her to the open doorway that started smoking in reams of blood red mist.

Mitchell Mack muttered, “This ain’t the way to win, Luke.”

“Is there a way to win?”

“There’s a way to lose more slowly.”

I shook my head. “When your head says one thing and your whole life says another, your head always loses."

“That’s cemetery talk."

"Why not? The War buried us. The only thing is, we’re not dead."

“Yet.”

The mists cleared enough to reveal cracked stone steps leading down into darkness.

They had not been there this morning.

Mitchell Mack pulled up short. “That tears it. Quit the act, Hybla.”

I smiled. So, my friend had pieced it together, too.

“Oh, I wish you had caught Luke at the top of his game, sister. He’d have had you for lunch, and I would have sat back and laughed at the sight.”

He ironed his face with his calloused fingers. “Now, it’s time for me to pull his fat out of the fire like he done so many times for me in the war.”

He turned to me. “She never said she had Perry, Luke. She just dropped the hint, and you ran with it.”

The penny dropped as the New Zealanders said. I wanted to kick myself. But it would have given Hybla too much satisfaction.

I looked hard at her. “You just wanted me as a cat’s paw to hunt down this Captain Blaine for you.”

Her face blurred, revealing a mottled skull’s face. “What of it? You will still do so, or I will kill your smarter friend in front of ….”

Habla never saw me draw Darael’s dagger or move. None of my victims behind enemy lines ever did. I had begun to think there was something cursed about the dagger.

I drove its blade between her now shriveled breasts. It was over so quick, shock didn’t even have time to register on her face. Though bone as it was, it might have been hard to tell if it had.

I cocked an eye to my startled friend. “I haven’t lost all of my moves … just most of my marbles.”

“Luke, ever since you lost Ingrid, you been dying in bits and pieces … like a slow leak. Ingrid’s memory deserves better. Hell, I deserve better.”

I nodded. “I promise to work on it.”

He raised a skeptical eyebrow, and I said, “M&M (Ingrid’s name for him), when have I ever broken a promise to you?”

Pale at my use of his nickname, he rasped, “Never.”

“And I don’t intend on doing so now. I plan to do some heavy reflecting tonight when I set up DeMille’s guillotine on the lot tonight.”

“Need some company?”

I shook my head. “No, I need to be alone to think things through. Besides, what could go wrong on a deserted movie lot?”

To find out just how much went awry, read the first chapter to FRENCH QUARTER REQUIEM:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B084P819CQ

“A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.”

- G. K. Chesterton