Haunted (35 page)

"There's always some editing."

"She said it was perfect the way it was and if they were too stupid to see that not one word should be changed, then they couldn't have it. She wrote a scathing editorial about the publishing industry and selling out in the next issue of the Guardian."

"She sounds utterly charming."

"To the core. And her mother never gives up trying to get her married off. Christ, Masters, I guess I'm just as bad a gossip as Minnie."

"It will go no further, I promise." David hesitated. "Can we change the subject?"

"Please."

"Okay. Do you know if there are any police records still around for the Body House Massacre of 1915?"

"You've been wanting to ask that all evening, haven't you?"

"Yeah, I have."

"There's nothing. Not a scrap. After I became chief, I had a really good look around, but it's all been destroyed. If it ever existed."

"What about doctor's records? Any idea where Louis Shayrock's rues got to?"

"No, and not for lack of looking. I thought I'd find out plenty, since the same family's been doctoring around here since God knows when. Keith Shayrock, his grandson, is our doc these days, but all he told me was that his granddaddy died in a fire in 1918. The family feeling is that he was murdered."

"Don't tell me. The fire was in his office and all his records were destroyed."

"Exactly right. You ought to give Keith a call and talk him up a little--you seem to be pretty good at that. Because of my job, sometimes people clam up around me even when there's no reason to." Craig cracked his knuckles with great enjoyment.  "Old Red Cay wasn't exactly the most upstanding place in the world, you know, and now and then, you hear talk about how many of Lizzie's customers were Red Cay's most upstanding citizens."

"The mayor and a senator were mentioned as victims," David told him.

"Mentioned where?"

"In the Guardian."

"From 1915?"

"Yes. There are several articles. I haven't even finished going through them yet, but--"

"The Guardian office burned down three weeks after the massacre, so all the morgue copies were destroyed." Craig lifted his eyebrows. "And all the copies of the papers mentioning the Body House massacre disappeared. Where the hell did you find the papers?"

"There were some boxes in the attic that Eric and I found. They were built to be invisible. The contents date back to 1911, the year Lizzie moved here, and they appear to go on for some time after her death. I'm guessing the retired navy man she left the place to packed the items away."

"Can I give you some advice?"

"Sure."

"Don't tell anyone else about the papers. Sure enough, they'll disappear on you. Copy them and send the originals somewhere safe out of town. Memories are long around here."

"I'll do that. You've done a lot of researching yourself."

"I have. I got interested in the original massacre in 1968, after the hippie slayings."

"Eric mentioned you were there. Was it bad?"

"It was very bad. Not as bad as that fetus stuck in the engine, I guess, nothing could be as bad as that. What got me curious about the old murders was that I'd heard stories about the methods of the murderer and they seemed very similar to the hippies. Jack the Ripper type stuff. But I couldn't find anything factual to verify it. All we have are word-of-mouth stories and some write-ups in books and magazines to go on, but those mean nothing since they were based on hearsay. No witnesses survived." He looked up hopefully. "You probably know more about the massacre than anyone else. I'd be real interested in taking a look at those articles."

"I'll be happy to make you copies." David grinned. "You can expose the ancestors of half the people in town as part of the scandal. There were a whole bushel of Coxes dipping their surnames that night."

"Really!" Craig laughed, delighted. "Any Swensons?"

"There might have been one, I can't recall offhand, but I'll look."

"Exactly what have you got? I'd sure like to find out about the condition of the bodies."

"I have lists of the victims and the missing persons. I also have a schematic of the locations of the victims, but so far I haven't found any detailing on the murder methods, except for one mention of a Ripper-style disembowelment I don't really expect to find anything else, either, not in newspaper clippings."

"Probably not." Craig lapsed into silence. The murders weren't important anymore, but the fascination held.

"Amber has found several of the missing dolls," David suddenly announced.

Craig looked up in amazement.

"They're in hidden compartments in furniture and walls. You know..."

"What?"

"It's probably a coincidence, but..."

"Spit it out, man!"

"Yesterday, Amber found an effigy of a sea captain. He didn't have a head."

"Oh?"

"She dropped it and was upset because it broke. She saw a pool of something that looked like blood underneath it and figured it had been filled with a red-colored oil or something. Then she picked it up and it spurted the stuff in her face. She says it was warm and that it tasted like blood." David paused. "It wasn't, of course, it couldn't be, but phenomena can suggest such things. It dried to a powder very quickly. I think these dolls were Christabel's creations--they have very obscene genitals--and I think she used them in her voodoo rites."

"Um hmm," Craig said doubtfully. "So Amber's okay?"

"She was shaken and I offered to move her out of the house, but she refused. She's no newcomer to weird phenomena. It's just a little too personal when it gets in your mouth."

"That's an understatement."

"I wonder..." David said slowly.

"What?"

"It sounds far-fetched, but I wonder if finding, or even breaking the doll could have some correlation to the appearance of the lighthouse ghost."

That did sound far-fetched, but Craig didn't say so. "Maybe I'm being overly cautious," he began, "but I wouldn't tell anyone about those dolls, either. Things disappear around here--hi, guys!"

"You two looked like you were having so much fun, we decided to leave you alone," Amber said as she and Eric stared down at them.

"Thanks," Craig said. "We grunted and burped and told stories."

"Guy stuff," David added.

"Well, it's almost eleven."

"Holy sh--cow!" Craig said, in deference to the girl. "Last time I looked at my watch, it was eight-thirty."

"Time flies," David said. "Amber, you look frozen to the bone."

"I am. Can we go home now?"

"You've got it." David rose and started gathering their trash while Eric doused the fire.

"Did you have a good time, kiddo?" David asked his daughter as the four walked back to the car.

"Yeah, Dad, great." She grinned. "But you two look like you had a better time."

Masters shrugged, a mildly embarrassed expression on his face.

"You're right, Amber," Craig said, as they reached the car.

"We had a good time." He tossed her the keys. "In fact, we had such a good time that you get to drive us home."

She stared at him a long moment, then bubbled, "Sure!" and Craig, bemused, thought she looked like she'd swallowed the proverbial canary. 

August 13

The Lighthouse: 2:31 P.M.

Eric Swenson wanted to visit the lighthouse by himself, so he waited until Amber had left for cheerleading practice to go out and repair the lock; Minnie was polishing floors, and David was shut away in his office. He'd meant to do it earlier in the week, but there had been no time until now.

Now, as he reinstalled the hardware with thicker, heavier bolts, he felt uncharacteristically nervous and half-wished he'd called David to help him, as the writer had requested.

He finished screwing in the top bolt and started on the bottom. The eerie feel of the lighthouse--of Body House and the entire finger, for that matter--had changed, had grown somehow stronger, so that now there was so much electricity in the air that it practically thrummed around him, filling his ears with thickness, making the golden hairs on his arms stand at attention. Creepy! Quickly, he finished attaching the bolt, then hesitated, his hand resting on the latch, and wondered whether to go in or not. After all, he'd come out here by himself for that express purpose. He'd wanted to find out just what had changed. Now, his guts were insisting that he didn't want to know.

Abruptly, the latch turned ice cold under his fingers and with a cry of surprise he let go. "What the heck?" he whispered, staring at the heavy wood-plank door.

It began to shake, almost imperceptibly at first, then harder and harder. Eric stepped back as the new metal fittings began to rattle and the four-inch-thick wood started to creak and groan.

Then as suddenly as it began, the shaking stopped. The silence was huge as Eric stepped forward and laid his hand on the latch. The freezing cold metal now felt nearly normal. Suddenly, something crashed against the door from inside, a huge, heavy weight. Despite the shock, Eric held his ground. Two seconds passed. Again the door was struck and, as he heard the sound of cracking timber, he leaped backward.

Again and again the force hit the door, until the new bolts were giving way and a crack appeared in one of the planks. One or two more strikes would open it.

“Captain?" Eric called tentatively.

Silence, then a sound like nails scrabbling against the door. “Captain Wilder?"

More scrabbling, like rat's claws moving over slick pavement, a pause, then thunder as the door was struck again.

Eric sensed frustration. "You want me to open the door, Captain?"

A single rap was the reply.

"Okay, I'm going to open it now." Swallowing hard, Eric stepped forward and depressed the latch, then moved back as the door swung slowly open.

The captain nearly filled the doorway, even without his head Eric stared, amazed at the changes in the apparition he'd seen so many times before.

Previously, Captain Wilder had appeared to be not quite solid, not quite opaque, allowing Eric to make out whatever was behind the figure. But now, as he stepped onto the threshold, he appeared as solid as any human. And he didn't feel like a leftover anymore.

"You--you're real, aren't you?" Eric whispered.

Slowly, one pale hand rose and rapped once on the door frame. The blood on the front of the uniform appeared fresh and sticky and a vertebra glinted whitely where the sun hit the neck.

"Are you Captain Wilder?"

Another rap. Then the hand moved toward Eric and gestured for him to come closer. When he didn't move, the apparition repeated the gesture, more impatiently.

"Okay," Eric whispered. Despite the horrifying appearance of the ghost, he didn't feel it meant him any harm. He inched toward the ghost, trying not to flinch as its cold hands took his upper arms and drew him to itself. The roaring in his ears increased and his mind was lost in the dark lake of a strange consciousness as he felt the tall, bloody body, cool and solid, against his own.

Body House: 2:33 P.M.

When the Masters and the Swensons had returned to Body House a few nights ago, David had shown them the dolls and let Craig scan through the articles. Eric hadn't been interested in touching the dolls--in fact, he'd refused, apprehension plain in his eyes, even though he'd expressed interest before he actually saw them. David had intended to ask him about it, but the next morning, prompted by a phone call from his editor Joanna, David had left Eric, the dolls, and the crate full of papers alone in favor of getting a chunk of book done.

He'd been making excuses--research being the best excuse--not to get down to serious work on Mephisto Palace. No matter what he was working on, the first half of a book took him five times as long as the last half because, until he got over the middle hump, he could never quite shake the notion that he'd started a project that he was incapable of completing.

Intellectually, he knew it was bullshit: he had enough books behind him to know that, but the feeling never quite left him. Until he began writing novels, he'd never in his life attempted a project he couldn't do in one sitting, whether it was a term paper or a crossword puzzle, building a birdhouse or learning to swim. If he stopped before the task was complete, he invariably walked away and never took it up again. It had proven to be a hard habit to break.

He'd learned to control it to some extent by thinking in scenes and chapters, but what had helped most of all was Joanna, who knew his neuroses better than he did. She knew he'd fritter away time, becoming steadily more anxious and depressed with each passing day, and she knew that, around mid-point, he'd turn manically gleeful as the end became a possibility in his mind. During that stage, she'd call him up and remind him to relax, to go see a movie or get laid, or whatever else occurred to her, but more importantly, during the early stages she'd call every couple of weeks, just as she had the other day, and make herself into his confessor whether he liked it or not. She'd give him annoying little inspirational speeches until he broke under the need to confess his lack of production to this angel of a woman. Or maybe she was a devil. Either way, the Catholics had it right: confessing felt good. The one she'd extracted most recently would be good for a couple of weeks worth of good, hard work, and that would get him over the top and into the manic phase he loved in no time at all.