Decatur (35 page)

Connie Pender looked around the big day room of the ward. It was free time and the patients were encouraged to mingle, not that they did much but it was the recreation plan they had. Everyone had been dosed with their meds on the previous shift so it was pretty quiet. They only had five beds filled on the twelve bed unit and that was fine with her. The priest that had been admitted yesterday at noon had finally come out of his room after not eating much of the soft food they had prescribed for him and seemed subdued, but otherwise base line normal for Ward Five E. She was more worried about keeping her eye on Carla, the seventeen-year-old who had run away from home, cut her wrists, and said she was possessed by the devil. If she caught wind that there was a priest on the ward as a patient, it might really stir her up. Carla stirred up was not a good idea.

Father Troy was shuffling and there was nothing he could do to stop it, his feet wouldn’t pick up, they flopped along the shiny floor. The haze was back and he had a sour taste in his mouth like he had eaten rotten limes. He looked around at his fellow inmates, a sad sack group in blue grey pajamas with a lot of drool. He was in pajamas too. He wiped his lip.
Wet. Shit
. Then he looked up and saw the plain wooden cross with the tiny modern Jesus hanging on the east wall. He shuffled two more steps to get a closer look. The mod little Jesus with the crown of thorns turned and looked right at him with disgust, like
He knew exactly what was wrong and why
he, Father Mark Troy - He knew his name, He knew his goddamn name - would never get to heaven now.
Through the fog he heard himself cry out, “Get down off of there. Get down and fix me. You little muther- fucker. I was a priest for you. ”

Carla had tongued her tranqs at noon time and spit them in the toilet after the nurse had left. She wasn’t going to take them any more ever. So when she saw the new patient coming out of room twelve on the ward she knew he had to be the priest. It was meant to be. She would finally be able to show these fools that she really could scare the shit out of anyone and that a demon lived inside her. But when she got a good look at the young shaggy-haired man struggling to walk down the hall, she had a weird feeling and suddenly didn’t want to get all that close to him, and instead feinted that she was busy looking out the window onto the parking lot below. When he started yelling, though, she couldn’t help herself: she had to get in closer.
This might be rare entertainment to see what Connie Pender was going to do now.

Connie Pender was mentally stuffing the fear back down in her chest as she pressed the buzzer on the desk for the orderlies to come to the lounge. Two sharp bursts signaled immediate distress. Steeling herself she left the protection of the nurses’ station and headed across the dayroom, smiling reassuringly at Randy, the forty-year-old who had lost his memory one day, been here a month, and was going to get transferred to long term care; nodding to Candy, the pretty ex-cheerleader who had bloated up, lost her husband, drunk some lighter fluid, six days here and she was committed to getting better; wagging her finger at Alex, the sixty-year-old depressive who was due to be discharged to his wife later this week because they couldn’t afford to keep him there, who was starting to moan. “Sit tight,” she said through dry lips. It was Carla, standing over by the window. That’s who she had to worry about.
Why in God’s name had Father Troy zeroed in on the cross?
Because he’s crazy
. She couldn’t help herself. Even after three summers of intensive training it was what she thought.

Lumley got up from the table in the break room where he had been smoking a Salem. They didn’t like it but Ward Five E duty came with its own set of rules. Two sharp bursts. Connie Pender needed them. He headed out, his feet big in dark soled shoes, his thighs rubbing together under his uniform. Connie was nice. She brought cookies from home sometimes. He wondered for a moment where Curtis was. Then he knew. Curtis was always in the staff bathroom. He jerked off a lot.

Father Troy saw the girl with her hair cut so short she almost look bald coming closer to him, like she was moving through molasses. She wasn’t drooling. “You,” he said, his arm coming out in a long slow arc as the bastard on the cross looked down like he had nothing whatsoever to do with what was wrong with him.

Carla felt something cold in the pit of her stomach as the priest in Ward Five E pj’s swung his arm back. She was already screaming as it came forward at her. The priest’s fingers brushed her chest and her nipples contracted back in her tiny breasts as if trying to get away. The priest turned his head and looked up at the Christ on the cross and seemed like he was going to throw up gagging then. She didn’t know if it was because her old man beat her every day from the time she was six that made her decide that she was never going to let anyone make her afraid again, but when she heard herself scream it was like she felt the pieces of her personality break apart like peanut brittle, and now all that was left was the beast. The one inside her, only it was wounded
. The priest had touched something, he had touched something he shouldn’t have touched.
All she could do was howl, and he howled too, coming at her as she fell back across the chairs and ottomans and sofa
that the good people, the good ones that were just galaxies away from here now had put there so they could all pretend that things were going to be alright. There wasn’t one all right thing about this.

Connie Pender stood rigid for one long second, her brain having a hard time processing what was happening. Mark Troy, thirty years old, ordained priest involuntarily committed by his Bishop, was coming across the furniture at Carla Winter, seventeen and a suicider who was screaming bloody murder. Lumley was in a full run at them; like a bear he came at the slight priest and got him in a head lock, swinging him down hard on the floor as the shirker Curtis came running along after with the restraints. Connie Pender decided then and there she was going back to pediatric care.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
The Story Always Told

The yellow taxi-cab careened around Church Street’s corner and screeched to a stop in front of the Surrey. The door to the back seat opened and Gretch growled for Marilyn to get in. Marilyn hadn’t been on the street but two minutes but she was cold all over and shaking and she got into the cab gratefully.

“Charlesworth campus, the arts and science building,” Gretch said to the driver who nodded noting that the waitress who they had rushed over from county records to pick up seemed pretty white in the face. He had driven the lame professor all over town that morning and afternoon from public library to county records and she had paid in a nice fat flat rate up front, so he was pretty well inclined to take her wherever she wanted to go and wait anytime she said stop.

“How’d you know to come?” Marilyn asked Gretch softly.

“You’re not the only one with instincts,” Gretch replied.

Max was tying up his lecture for his one-thirty, History of Psych 300 and giving the next week’s assignments as the two women climbed out of the cab in front of his building. They had just made it to his classroom as the students were getting out and Max was looking perturbed with his grad student Chad.

“What do you mean they got a student activity permit? Charlesworth Place may be owned by the University but it’s not on campus. Who would give a permit for something like this that’s not even on campus? ” Max’s voice was uncustomarily raised. The lumpy student in a Charlesworth University sweatshirt shrugged and showed him a carbon copy of something on a clip board.

“I never signed that!” Max said, feeling a wave of panic shoot through him. How had he been so distracted to have not picked up that Chad had allowed his independent study students for their final project to mount a
psychic fair
instead of doing a paper and talk on the history of mediums? His friend Taylor Hinson, the department chair, would not be pleased: it violated their unwritten contract that Max wouldn’t emphasize his true areas of interest at the school. The dean of combined sciences would be fit to be tied and the president of Charleworth, a Christian oriented school---it was almost comic to think of but not quite. It was then he saw Gretch Wendell and Marilyn and for a split second he felt torn, unsure of where to place his attention.

“You better get over there and supervise, don’t you think? I mean the place is not even used regularly,” Max said to Chad, looking a mimeographed flier with astrological signs around edges that read:

Psychic Fair

Mediums, Tarot Cards, Charts

Featuring Madame Josie and Her Clan

3-7 Wednesday May 2, 1973

Charlesworth Place, Decatur Illinois

Put on by the History of Psychology 300 Independent Study Group

If Gretch and Marilyn hadn’t been standing there he would have taken off in the Impala that instant: in another time and another place a psychic fair put on by a group of undergraduates would have seemed innocent enough, but here it just stirred up bad memories and seemed like a mockery of his times at University of Chicago. The location of the so-called fair bothered him most of all: why didn’t they do it on campus, he wondered.

“Something wrong, Max?” Gretch said sticking her hand out. Max nodded and handed her the flier.

The grad student, Chad, noted that the waitress was back again, this time her head wrapped in a cherry red scarf and with a small limping woman who had to be some kind of academic. But he was now regretting letting the students in the study group talk him into the fair, which had seemed sort of out there but fun, and he decided he better get over to Charlesworth Place before Rosenbaum got more worked up. “It hasn’t even started yet, I’m on it,” he said, and darted away.

A hard knot formed in Marilyn’s throat as she read the flier over Gretch’s shoulder. She hadn’t said much in the cab, just lay against the grainy seat covers and waited until they were somewhere safe to talk, but now everything was massing together and the things she had so long avoided were inescapable. “Madam Josie and her clan, you know that’s where Mona took me?” Marilyn said to Max.

“And?” Max said feeling the dread coming up like bile in his mouth.

“Let’s go to the Map Room,” she said, the words coming painfully. They were huddled in the hallway outside of Max’s classroom.

“It’s three flights,” Max said, his eyes darting over to Gretch.

“Then we better start climbing,” Gretch replied, stuffing the flier into the pants pocket of her soft grey flannels.

The worn blue stone steps of the flights up to the Map Room had never seemed so steep. Gretch pulled one leg after the other, first taking the step with the good leg and then dragging the bad behind. She felt the tingling numbness in her right leg and the random corkscrews of pain shooting through her as she held onto the railing for support.

“Charlesworth Place. From what I could make out from the news clippings I could find about your mother’s employer, J.J. Charlesworth, his wife drowned on the grounds,” Gretch said through her teeth as she climbed. The clatter of the building continued on around them and a couple of students were hurrying down the stairs past them but they felt like they were alone.

“It was suicide. I was eight years old,” Marilyn said, coming slowly behind Gretch not wanting to rush the older woman as she struggled up to the second floor landing.

“Haunted?” Gretch asked

“Marilyn thinks so,” Max said, looking over his shoulder to the two women behind him, the stone stairwell with its wrought iron railing seeming so ordinary and yet on another plane of reality at the same time.

“The news stories were mighty delicate about the suicide and of course no mention of any paranormal activity. On a hunch, I started to comb through what I could learn about Decatur, trying to figure out why here, why now. J.J. Charlesworth, son of the founder of this institution, was well known in the twenties and thirties as a collector of unusual relics. I may have run across him myself in my own travels and not realized it,” Gretch said.
One more flight.
“What happened to J.J., Marilyn? I visited county records and they can’t find a death certificate,” Gretch’s voice was low and gravely as they moved up the last flight of stairs.

Marilyn was silent, counting the steps: three more to go to the third floor, five feet to the left, and then the sanctuary of the Map Room. She wanted Rowley so bad at that moment but he was locked inside Max’s apartment, waiting patiently for her to return.

“It’s because he’s here now,” she finally said.

The Map Room was deserted as always and Marilyn, taking her scarf off, went immediately to the green leather chair near the windows where she customarily sat in their previous hypnotic sessions. She looked at the two professors whose faces mirrored the anxiety she felt herself, she had told them in a quick rush of words what happened when J.J. manifested himself in the Surrey and how it was a déjà vu, like it was always going to happen
. Well almost everything, she couldn’t quite bring herself to tell them about how J. J. said she was going to “turn”
. But then it seemed like a chasm opened between her and her friends, the room lengthened and they were suddenly far away.

“You need to tell us what’s going on Marilyn,” Gretch said but her voice was echoey.

“We’ve got to get to Charlesworth Place, I can’t leave those kids there,” Max’s eyes were pleading, only they were so distant, Marilyn could hardly see them. “What do you know about J.J. Charlesworth, because the way I figure the time line he should be a dead man in a grave somewhere, not out walking around.”

Marilyn shuddered, slipping further away into the recesses where it was safer.

Gretch got up then and came over to Marilyn; putting her hand on her shoulder and inhaling and exhaling, she leaned over the younger woman as the motes thickened in the late afternoon sun and Max would have sworn that some faint glistening web spun around Marilyn. Then Gretch Wendell stepped back and cocked her head like an inquisitive bird might. There was a charged pause.

“I’m going to need your help,” Marilyn said simply as the room telescoped back into itself and suddenly she was sitting with Max Rosenbaum and Gretch Wendell, two of the people she trusted most.

Max nodded, gestured Gretch to sit and began the hypnotic ritual seamlessly. As he directed Marilyn to let go of her conscious self he also heard his own internal voice telling him to breathe and stay grounded because it felt like the floor might give way at any moment; even though the trees fluttered and the shadows of their leaves were like moths against the leaded glass window, there was something in the air, something coming.
No, not coming - here
.

“I want you to go back to when you were a little girl, when you were eight or nine and your mother worked at Charlesworth Place,” Max said when he was sure Marilyn had gone under, “What happened to Mrs.Charlesworth?”

“Kiki killed herself, she went to the fishes,” Marilyn’s voice was higher and sweeter, a younger version of her own adult voice.
She was back on the grounds where she played every day of her life, watching the men lifting out the soaked body of J.J.’s young wife, her dress pasted to her white flesh, her hair running down her back. Only J.J. wasn’t looking at Kiki: he was standing looking at
her
, watching from the trees.

“Why did she do that?” Max asked.

“She was lonely,” Marilyn replied. “It’s hard being lonely.”

Gretch whispered to Max, “She’s repressing, Max.”

“And that’s all, she was just lonely?” Max bit his lip. “Remember, here you can tell me anything, Marilyn.”

“She was afraid of J. J.,” Marilyn slipped further down into the chair and her voice dropped to a near whisper, “Everyone was afraid of J.J. Mom said it was the things he got in Italy. He was a collector. Kiki said he had changed since he’d come back and she didn’t want that kind of stuff in the house anymore; that he wasn’t the man she married. I liked Kiki, but she cried a lot
.” Marilyn heard the raised voices coming out the window of the house as she sat on the amber fragrant needles hidden by the boughs of the weeping pine tree. No-one knew she was there and she watched as pretty Kiki put her arms up to protect her face.

Max looked over at Gretch who nodded thoughtfully as if to say, keep going on this tack. “Do you think he changed?”

“J.J. got fixed on things more when he got back, that’s how Mom explained it. After Kiki died and they drained the pond he just got more like he was. I could hear him talking in my head some times in this low whisper about how when the time was right and the infernity was strong, the pond would re-fill itself. He spent a lot of time in the turret room on the third floor with his collection. I wanted to see what he had, that’s all. No-one was supposed to go in there, Mom couldn’t even go in to clean. He said he liked the cob webs - made it feel like home. I wanted to see what he had brought back from Italy that made Kiki cry so much. I couldn’t stop thinking about it.” Marilyn bit her lip and brushed her hair out of her eyes.

“So what did you do then?” Max asked

Marilyn hesitated, her eyes darting around the room like a hunted animal.

“You can tell me, what did you do?” Max persisted.

“I started my own collection, of antique bottles.” Marilyn said.

“That’s interesting, Marilyn.” Max said smoothly even as his mind flashed back to seeing an assortment of old bottles with colored water along with the toys on Marilyn’s apartment bookshelf.
Given the experiences of Isabella and the soul’s tears, was the child Marilyn somehow reaching back into her own past lives?

“It just came to me to start looking for them. I didn’t have any friends so I had a lot time to look, I found them by the railroad and in the graveyard, there are a lot of old medicine jars and bottles once you know how to look for ‘em. Then I got the little bottles of food dye that look like tear drops and made my own colors and filled them with the colored water, stoppering them with sealing wax and cork so it would look like they still had potions and medicines in them. But I never told J. J. about my collection, even though we had that in common. But I could tell: the collection room in the tower wanted me to come up there; it wasn’t my fault at all.” Marilyn’s voice was breathy and soft, her face a version of itself that was at once innocent and cunning.

Gretch’s eyes looked old to Max as she observed Marilyn. She had seen what could happen when sensitive children and dark objects intermingled. Marilyn as an Instrument and a child was being drawn into a web where the dark arts were being used.

“What ‘wasn’t your fault’, Marilyn? You know that J. J. accused you of stealing something very special from him, don’t you?” Max was walking a fine line here he knew, pressing her, using confidential information from Weston, but they had to get to the bottom of it now.

“I didn’t steal!” Marilyn’s face closed up like a tulip at the end of day.

“Okay, I believe you but I need for you to tell Gretch and I what happened at Charlesworth Place the year you were nine,” Max backed off, not wanting to break the trance.

“The year I was nine?” Marilyn’s voice got dreamy again.

“After Kiki died,” Gretch said softly.

“Something happened with you and J. J.? It’s all right for you tell us now, it’s what you need to do, and it’s going to be all right,” Max prompted.

Marilyn paused for a long moment and then spoke. “That’s when J.J. would nap until early afternoon most days and then he would get up and start raising cain, drinking gin and inviting strangers in. Sometimes they would stay but mostly they went and they never seemed to go happy. Mom made sure we were gone every night by dark.”

“Were you still obsessing about his collection or had you forgotten all about it by then?” Max asked.

“It wouldn’t let me stop thinking about it - but school always let out too late, so that J. J. would be back up again,” Marilyn said

“So you couldn’t ever really get up there or did you figure something else out, Marilyn, I know what a smart girl you are, did you figure it out?” Max asked, hating himself in a way for manipulating her.