The Best Paranormal Crime Stories Ever Told

I just didn’t expect to see my own perfect double rising out of her magic fire like a genie coming out of a lantern. I pulled out my piece and fired at it.

“Noooo!” screamed the Widow Butera. She leapt at me, knocked my gun aside, and started clawing at my face.

“Kill it! Kill it!” I shouted at the others.

Carmine said, “I always wanted to do this to you, Vito,” and started pumping bullets into my doppelgangster while I fought the Widow. Father Michael ran around the room praying loudly and drenching things in holy water. Tony took a baseball bat-don’t ask me where he got it-and started destroying everything in sight: the amulets and charms hanging everywhere, the jars of powders and potions stacked on shelves, the cages containing live chickens, and the bottles of blood. My perfect double shattered into a million pieces in the hail of Carmine’s bullets, and the pieces fell smoldering into the fire. Then Tony kicked at the fire until it was scattered all over the living room and started dying.

“It’s a fucking shame about the carpet,” Carmine said as chickens escaped the shattered cages and started running all over the room.

“… blessed are thou, and blessed is the fruit of they womb…” Father Michael was chanting.

“What else can I break? What else can I break?” Tony shouted.

“I’ll kill you all!” the Widow screamed. “You’re all dead!”

“Too late, sister, we’re onto you now. You’ve whacked your last wiseguy,” I said as she struggled in my grip.

“Three husbands I lost in your damned wars!” she screamed. “I told them to get out of organized crime and into something secure, like accounting or the restaurant business, but would they listen? Noooo! ”

“Secure? The fucking restaurant business? Are you kidding me?”

“The Berninis and Gambones ruined my life!” The Widow Butera shrieked. “I will have vengeance on you all!”

“Repent! Repent!” Father Michael cried. Then he doused her with a whole bottle of holy water.

“Eeeeeeeeeee!” She screamed something awful… and then started smoking like she was on fire.

I’m not dumb. I let go of her and backed away.

The room filled with smoke and the Widow’s screams got louder, until they echoed so hard they made my teeth hurt… then faded. There was a dark scorch mark on the floor where she’d been standing.

“Where’d she go?” I said.

“She’ll never get her fucking security deposit back now,” said Carmine, looking at the floor.

Tony added, “No amount of buffing will get that out.”

“What the hell happened?” I said, looking around the room. The Widow had vanished.

Father Michael fell to his knees and crossed himself. “I don’t think she was completely human. At least, not anymore. She had become Satan’s minion.”

“Huh. I wondered how she kept her good looks for so fucking long.”

“That’s it?” I asked Father Michael. “She’s just… gone?”

He nodded. “In hell, where she belongs.” After a moment, he added, “Mind you, that’s only a theory.”

“Either way,” I said, “I’m kinda relieved. I know we couldn’t just let her go. Not after she’d hit three guys and tried to hit me and Joey, too. But I really didn’t want to whack a broad.”

“What a fucking pussy you are, Vito.”

“Carmine, you asshole,” I said, “the sitdown was successful. We found out who’s behind these hits, we put a stop to it, and there ain’t gonna be no new war. So now get outta my sight before I forget my manners and whack you just for the hell of it.”

“Did I mention how much fun it was pumping a whole clip into your fucking doppelgangster?”

My cell phone rang, making Father Michael jump.

“Damn.” I knew who it was even before I answered it. “Hello?”

“Vito,” said Joey, “I’ve been sitting here in my car, not going anywhere, just like you said, for a whole hour. Now do you want to tell me what the hell is going on?”

I looked at the scorched spot the Widow had left in the floor and tried to think of the best way to break the news to him. “So, Joey… would you still want to marry the Widow Butera if you knew she’d been trying to whack you and everyone you know?”

The Necromancer’s Apprentice by Lillian Stewart Carl

Robert Dudley, Master of the Queen’s Horses, was a fine figure of a man, as long of limb and imperious of eye as one of his equine charges. And like one of his charges, his wrath was likely to leave an innocent passerby with a shattered skull.

Dudley reached the end of the gallery, turned, and stamped back again, the rich fabrics of his clothing rustling an accompaniment to the thump of his boots. Erasmus Pilbeam shrank into the window recess. But he was no longer an innocent passerby, not now that Lord Robert had summoned him.

“You beetle-headed varlet!” his lordship exclaimed. “What do you mean he cannot be recalled?”

Soft answers turn away wrath, Pilbeam reminded himself. “Dr. Dee is perhaps in Louvain, perhaps in Prague, researching the wisdom of the ancients. The difficulty lies not only in discovering his whereabouts, but also in convincing him to return to England.”

“He is my old tutor. He would return at my request.” Again Lord Robert marched away down the gallery, the floor creaking a protest at each step. “The greatness and suddenness of this misfortune so perplexes me that I shall take no rest until the truth is known.”

“The inquest declared your lady wife’s death an accident, my lord. At the exact hour she was found deceased in Oxfordshire, you were waiting upon the Queen at Windsor. You could have had no hand…”

“Fact has never deterred malicious gossip. Why, I have now been accused of bribing the jurors. God’s teeth! I cannot let this evil slander rest upon my head. The Queen has sent me from the court on the strength of it!” Robert dashed his fist against the padded back of a chair, raising a small cloud of dust, tenuous as a ghost.

A young princess like Elizabeth could not be too careful what familiar demonstrations she made. And yet, this last year and a half, Lord Robert had come so much into her favor it was said that her Majesty visited him in his chamber day and night… No, Pilbeam assured himself, that rumor was noised about only by those who were in the employ of Spain. And he did not for one moment believe that the Queen herself had ordered the disposal of Amy Robsart, no matter how many wagging tongues said that she had done so. Still, Lord Robert could hardly be surprised that the malicious world now gossiped about Amy’s death, when he had so neglected her life.

“I must find proof that my wife’s death was either chance or evil design on the part of my enemies. The Queen’s enemies.”

Or, Pilbeam told himself, Amy’s death might have been caused by someone who fancied himself the Queen’s friend.

Lord Robert stalked backup the gallery and scrutinized Pilbeam’s black robes and close-fitting cap. “You have studied with Dr. Dee. You are keeping his books safe whilst he pursues his researches in heretical lands.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“How well have you learned your lessons, I wonder?”

The look in Lord Robert’s eye, compounded of shrewd calculation and ruthless pride, made Pilbeam’s heart sink. “He has taught me how to heal illness. How to read the stars. The rudiments of the alchemical sciences.”

“Did he also teach you how to call and converse with spirits?”

“He-ah-mentioned to me that such conversation is possible.”

“Tell me more.”

“Formerly it was held that apparitions must be spirits from purgatory, but now that we know purgatory to be only papist myth, it must be that apparitions are demonic, angelic, or illusory. The devil may deceive man into thinking he sees ghosts or…” Pilbeam gulped. The bile in his throat tasted of the burning flesh of witches.