Criminal Macabre
Criminal Macabre: The Complete Cal McDonald Stories (Second Edition)
© 2002, 2003, 2005, 2007, 2022 by Steve Niles.
No portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the express written permission of the copyright holders. Names, characters, places, and incidents featured in this publication either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), events, institutions, or locales, without satiric intent, is coincidental. Dark Horse Books® and the Dark Horse logo are registered trademarks of Dark Horse Comics LLC. All rights reserved.
Portions of this book previously appeared as Savage Membrane, published by ibooks, Inc., and Guns, Drugs, and Monsters and Dial M For Monster, published by IDW Publishing. “All My Bloody Things” first appeared in Dark Delicacies, published by Carroll & Graf Publishers.
Book design by May Hijikuro
Cover art by E.M. Gist
Cover design by May Hijikuro
Special thanks to Shawna Gore, Jemiah Jefferson, Daniel Chabon, Chuck Howitt, Konner Knudsen, and Annie Gullion.
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Published by Dark Horse Books
A division of Dark Horse Comics LLC
10956 SE Main Street
Milwaukie, OR 97222
DarkHorse.com
First edition: March 2022
Ebook ISBN 978-1-50672-748-6
Trade Paperback ISBN 978-1-50672-747-9
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
Foreword
One of my favorite writers these days is Steve Niles, and arguably his most inventive, compelling character is Cal McDonald. You hold in your hands Criminal Macabre: The Complete Cal McDonald Stories.
Cal began life way back in 1990 in a story called “Big-Head.” Let’s just be honest: Cal is a drug addict. He’s also a detective. He also stands with one foot in a world of darkness, magic, and monsters. He stands there and fights back against the forces marshaled against us humans. He is a flawed hero, much like Philip Marlowe before him, and cops really don’t want to work with him. But thank God for us, they do.
Steve Niles is best known for 30 Days of Night, but for my money his coolest stuff is his work with Kelley Jones on Batman and the man himself, Cal McDonald.
So sit back and enjoy Steve Niles at his scariest best in these stories of evil streets, things in the night, and Cal McDonald.
Savage Membrane
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.