The Best Paranormal Crime Stories Ever Told

The old man smiled, revealing tobacco-stained teeth. The smile was friendlier than Decker expected. “Admittedly, you American hacks, as you say, are dozens of dimes-”

Decker winced.

“-but I, in truth, have been waiting for you.”

Decker drank his water. It did clear his head, although he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted his head cleared. “What’s so special about me?”

“You see,” the old man said again.

This time, Decker did roll his eyes. He drank the last of his water, and stood up. “Old man, I’m so damned drunk that this conversation isn’t making sense. How about I meet you here tomorrow at midnight, and I promise to be sober. Then you can tell me your story.”

“It is your story,” the old man said.

“Whatever you say,” Decker said, taking the bottle of water and heading north.

He had a hell of a walk-at least for an exhausted drunk. Normally he wouldn’t have minded the jaunt up to the twisty little streets near the Sorbonne. The Hotel de Lisbonne was on the corner of Rue Monsieur-le-Prince and Rue de Vaugirad. All he had to was walk the Boulevard St. Michel toward the Seine and he’d be in his bed in no time.

But he usually avoided the Boulevard St. Michel. He avoided a lot streets in Paris, at least on foot. The old man was right; Decker saw things. But he usually attributed those things to drink or to too much imagination.

The soldiers he always saw marching through the Arc de Triomphe wore no uniforms he recognized. They marched in lock-step, their heads turned side to side as if they were little tin soldiers with moving parts.

But he didn’t always see the soldiers there. Sometimes he saw a flag that he didn’t recognize with a Fylfot in the middle. The Fylfot, an ancient elaborate cross, was supposed to ward off evil. But he somehow got the sense that the Fylfot itself-at least as used here-was the evil.

On the Boulevard St. Michel, he saw students rioting in the streets. The students were grubby creatures, with long hair and carrying signs that he did not understand. Sunshine shone on them, although he only saw them when it was dark.

Because of these visions, he studied Paris history, and found nothing that resembled any of it. The soldiers were unfamiliar, just like the flag, and the students too filthy to belong to any modern generation. He could dismiss such things as figments of his imagination.

But the woman-she had been real.

He had touched her, her skin cold and clammy and gray from the elements. Her eyes had been open and cloudy, her lips parted ever so slightly.

He had found her six months into his trip to Paris. Shortly after, he had wandered into the offices of the Trib, such as they were, and offered up his services.

Novelist, eh, kid? The man at the copy desk had asked.

Yessir.

You know how many novelists we get here, hoping for a few bucks? At least two a day. Sorry.

I have experience…

Those fateful words. I have experience. And he did. From his college newspaper to the Milwaukee Journal-yes, he had been a good Midwestern boy, once too, a boy who didn’t like near beer. A boy who actually had dreams for himself.

Five thousand words of horseshit later, stories about the tourists (Mr. and Mrs. Gladwell arrived this afternoon on a trip that has taken them from their home in Lincoln, Nebraska, to New York City through London, and now here, in Paris, where they are staying at the Ritz…), stories about everything except the woman, crumpled beneath Pont Neuf.

Somehow he made it to the Hotel de Lisbonne without seeing anyone, real or imaginary. The front desk was empty, so he reached over it and grabbed his key.

As he climbed the dark narrow stairs to his room, he heard a typewriter rat-a-tat-tatting. Someone was working on something, maybe a short story, maybe a novel, maybe a freelance piece for Town and Country.

He unlocked his room and stepped inside, then stared at his own typewriter, gathering dust beneath the room’s only window. A piece of paper had been rolled in the platen since sometime last month, with only a page number on the upper right hand corner (27), and a single lowercase word in the upper left.

… the…

As if it meant something. As if he knew what he was going to do with it.

The paper was probably ruined, forever curlicued, although it didn’t matter. If he finished typing on that page, he could pile the other twenty-six pages on top of it, flattening it out.

If he sat down now, nearly sober, the old man’s words still echoing in his head (You see them too), he would write:

The woman discarded at the foot of the bridge looked uncomfortably young. Her brown hair was falling out of Gibson Girl do, now horribly out of fashion, her lips painted a vivid red. Part of the lip rouge stained her front teeth. If she were alive, she would turn away from him, and surreptiously rub at that stain with her index finger.

He looked away from the typewriter, from that little accusatory “the.” The description of the woman did not fit with the bucolic piece he had been writing, a memoir of Germantown Wisconsin in the days before the war, when he had been a young boy, and his father was still alive, tinkering with his new Model T, his mother tutting the dangers in the new-fangled machinery, the bicycle he himself had built from a kit, with the help of the man who lived next door.

Those were the kind of books people read now, memories of times past, not bloody, dark stories about dead women on Paris streets.

Decker took off his suit and hung it up, although he didn’t brush it out, like he should have. He lacked the energy. As he pulled off his shirt, he realized the stains were worse than he had thought. Long, brown stains up front, looking like blood.

He was thinking of blood, though. He wasn’t going to let his imagination win.

Besides, he still had one clean shirt. He needed to take the bundle to the laundry, along with his suit, so that he could look pressed and sharp again, instead of rumpled and disreputable.

He left his undershirt, boxers, and socks on, and tumbled onto the bed, the saggy mattress groaning beneath his weight. The bed hadn’t even stopped bouncing by the time he had fallen asleep.

She was there in his dreams, her rich brown hair piled on top of her head, with a few curls cascading around her face. She sat on the edge of the bridge, feet dangling over the Seine, leaning back toward the road. Her eyes smiled, her lips-a perfect cupid’s bow, just like the drawings she mimicked-rouged darker than her cheeks. The makeup softened her living face, making her seem as unreal as the women in the advertisements.

While her hair was old-fashioned, her clothing was not. No buttoned down shirtwaist for her with a long skirt that fell to her ankles. She wore a black skirt that grazed her knees, silk stockings with a perfect line up the back, and a blouse so soft that it seemed almost indecent. Around her neck, a simple St. Christopher’s medal, and a delicate gold cross with a tiny diamond in the center. A gold band on her right hand, a band she twisted when she saw him approach, a frown creasing her lovely forehead.

He stopped beside her. She was American-he knew that without asking-and he held his reporter’s notebook in his left hand, a pen in his right.

Her face shut down when he asked her name. And then her eyes clouded over, and her mouth opened ever so slightly.

The St. Christopher’s medal disappeared and the gold ring too. But the expensive necklace, the gold cross with a diamond in the center, remained, as if it were her calling card.

He woke up thinking about it, twisted to one side, the bottom of the cross bent slightly as if she had fallen on it against the stone walkway.

She had worn no stockings when he found her body, and the sensible shoes, made for walking in a strange city