The 'Geisters (23 page)

The Hallway of Light.

“Ian,” said Ann finally, when her breath found her again, “what’s behind that door?”

“You don’t have to go,” he said, “if you’d rather not.”

“It’s the Insect, right?”

Ian said nothing. He shut his eyes tightly, bit on his lower lip. In the Hallway of Light in her mind, he was a shrivelled gnome, shrinking and crumbling in the sun. Ann studied him.

“Oh my,” she said. “Ian. You’re terrified.”

Ian didn’t answer.

She nodded. “Whatever’s behind that door. It’s as good as it gets for you, isn’t it?”

Ian whispered to himself.

“Well I’m not afraid,” she said, and knocked on the door three times, sharply.

When the door opened, Ann wondered briefly whether the hand that opened it would be human. This time, it was. She recognized its owner immediately.

“I didn’t catch your name back in the orchard,” she said.

Mister Sleepy’s babysitter had changed clothes.

Now he was wearing a crisp white tunic and matching trousers, both made from loose-woven cotton. Ann had seen ensembles like this in Little India on Gerrard Street.

“It’s Peter,” he said. “Hello, Mrs. Voors. Hope you’re feeling refreshed.”

“As you’d expect.”

“Quite,” he said, and looked over to Ian, and nodded. Ian nodded back.

“Well why don’t you come in, Mrs. Voors.”

Peter stepped aside, and beckoned Ann into a small sitting room, with couches like the one Ann had woken up on to either side of the door. Opposite walls had small dark wooden tables underneath mirrors, with table lamps on each.

There were no windows. On the far side of the room, there was another set of doors much like this one. They were propped open, to darkness.

“How’s your little girl?” Ann asked.

“She’s just fine, ma’am. Though as you’ve probably guessed, she’s not my child.”

Ian jumped in: “Peter’s up from Tennessee. With his niece. Isn’t that right?”

“That’s where you’re from,” said Ann. “You probably don’t remember, but you and I met. In Mobile.”

“I reckon we did meet, Mrs. Voors, at least nearly,” said Peter. “Glad you made it here safe.”

Was he glad? Ann had to wonder. He was a southerner: probably one of Rickhardt’s judgemental Americans; maybe from the same little coven that’d spawned John Hirsch. If he’d taken her at the Rosedale Arms, she doubted he’d have brought her here, to Southern Ontario. Assuming he could have wrangled her and the Insect, likely she would have wound up in whatever facility they’d built at St. Augustine.

If the opportunity arose, would he do that now?

He didn’t give her the chance to ask. “I’ll tell the Doctor you’re in,” he said. “Excuse me a moment, please.”

“The Doctor?” Ann asked as he stepped through the doors and into darkness. Ian said nothing.

“What is this place?” said Ann finally.

“It’s the Octagon: which is to say, an octagon. We pitched it as an homage, to the old octagon houses that used to be safe houses for the Underground Railroad here in Upper Canada.”

“Back in the day. When slavery was more, um, institutionalized? Nice juxtaposition.”

Rickhardt barked a laugh. “Good one,” he said. “Of course, the octagon has other symbolism too.
Older
symbolism.”

Ann wouldn’t bite. “And it’s a ballroom?” she said instead.

“It’s not. ‘Ballroom’ is what’s written on the plans we filed with the township.”

“So no weddings here,” said Ann.

“No,” he said. “Maybe next time.”

Ian sat down on one of the couches. Ann made a point of sitting on the other. “Must have cost you a fortune,” she said, and Ian nodded.

“As you can tell by now,” he said, “I’m not what you’d call stingy. And,” he added, as the door beyond them swung open, into the darkness, “I’m not alone.”

Ann blinked, as the man who was surely the Doctor stepped from it, into the light.

“Look at
you
,” said Charlie Sunderland.

He had lost some hair, and gained a little weight, but not so much of either, given that Ann had last seen him more than fifteen
years ago.

He wore a pair of dark slacks, a white shirt and unlike Rickhardt and Peter, dark leather shoes. He stepped forward, gingerly shut the door behind him. He looked as though he’d gotten some sun.

“You’re all grown,” he continued, as he moved to sit on Ann’s couch. Ian withdrew perceptibly. It was as though Dracula had stepped into the room. Or more aptly, Josef Mengele.

If Ann looked at him in just the right way, she thought she might scream.

She had guessed about Sunderland being here, being involved; Ian had as much as confirmed it.

But the fact of him, here—it was a blunt, visceral thing; the dangling string off the end of a long continuum that had begun in a little room years ago, and continued in another little room in the woods, and finished here. She crossed her legs and folded her hands on her knee, and knitted her fingers together tightly.

Sunderland smiled gently.

“I can imagine,” he said, “that you’re angry with me.”

Ann shut her eyes. She imagined that she was angry, too. She didn’t say anything though.

“Well, you might have cause to be,” he said. “If nothing else, I didn’t do a very good job then, in fulfilling my promise to your parents.”

“That’s true,” said Ann, opening her eyes again. “You didn’t do any kind of job.

“They died, because you weren’t trying to help me at all. You were trying to turn me into what—a courtesan?”

His smile faded a little, and he looked at her. “Oh dear,” he said. “I may have left you with the impression just now that I am here to apologize to you.” Dr. Sunderland ran a forefinger along the back of the couch; if they were sitting any nearer one another, it might have seemed as though he were trying to seduce her.

“You’ve been drinking,” he continued, “a lot. And you’re exhausted. You haven’t really slept in nearly twenty-four hours—possibly longer. Most of that time, you’ve been driving, and for most of that drive, you’ve been terrified. You have no capacity left, do you? You don’t even know why you’re here right now.”

Dr. Sunderland spoke in slow, measured tones that had a lulling effect. Ann drew a deep breath, and blinked.

“So why,” he said, “don’t you simply repeat the words again: ‘Belaim, foredawned, sheepmorne . . .’”

“Fuck off,” said Ann, and at that, Dr. Sunderland was quiet. He blinked, as though he’d been slapped. Ian, on the other couch, started to get up, but Sunderland motioned for him to sit.

“We are very close to a thing right now, Ann,” said Sunderland. “A very big thing. And you’re angry, very understandably angry. Would I be too far off the mark if I said that you thought you might be able to disrupt this thing of ours? Perhaps hurt myself, and Mr. Rickhardt here, and the rest of us?”

Ann didn’t answer.

He sighed. “We do need you here right now. If you want to use your time here, attempting to call down the heavens on all of us . . .
well, that’s up to you. I’d understand.”

“You don’t think I can.”

“You know you can’t,” said Sunderland. “If you could, you would have by now.”

“Ask Mr. Hirsch what I can do,” she said.

Sunderland ignored the comment. “We are on the edge of something very big, Ann. I think on some level you know that. I think that is why you came back here.”

“I came back here,” she said, “to get my brother.”

Sunderland nodded. “And you’re still here, even though you’ve been told that he’s gone ‘home.’ Why do you suppose that is?”

“Because . . .” Ann took a breath, stifled a yawn “. . . because I don’t believe that.”

And he smiled, broadly. “That’s an excellent instinct you have,” he said.

Ann sat up. “Is he here?” she asked, and Sunderland motioned with one long arm to the doors, now shut.

“Through there,” he said.

Rickhardt tried to hold Ann’s hand as Sunderland held the door open for them. Ann pulled away. Sunderland was right in some of his observations; she was exhausted, and the wine from the other wing of this place had left a sour taste in her mouth. The world had a shimmer to it that she recognized, from the morning after all-night study sessions. But he was wrong: that she came here, on any level giving a shit about the
thing
that Sunderland and his ’geisters were on the verge of discovering, or extracting, or whatever it was he had planned; and oh, he was wrong about the fact that she had no power.

She was sure he was wrong about that.

He had to be.

Darkness enveloped her as the doors shut behind them, and Ann fought an instant of panic. Should she have taken Ian Rickhardt’s hand? The air was suddenly icy cold, as though she’d stepped into a big refrigerated room. The only sound was her own heartbeat, which accelerated in a rush of adrenaline. Screaming might have helped; but as it had moments before, her breath caught still in her throat. She couldn’t so much as whisper.

She could walk, though, and she did so, stumbling forward, hands held in front of her. It seemed as though she were running down a ramp of some sort.

The darkness split in front of her in a vertical line of dim light. As it spread further, Ann could see that what was opening was a curtain being drawn—they had stepped into a small circle defined by a thick curtain. It rattled aside on its bar on top, and as it did, Ann found her breath. She stepped forward, and as she did, she was struck by the truth of it:

This wasn’t a ballroom at all. It was a tower.

It was a pit.

They were standing on a wide balcony, that circled an octagonal atrium measuring perhaps thirty feet across. A single pillar, with a spiral staircase, ran up the middle; a narrow walkway extended to the staircase from a spot opposite where they stood.

There were more walkways: the balcony was one of at least three; there was one maybe ten feet over Ann’s head, and another as far below. The floor, as she peered over, was a dozen feet below that. It may have gone down further; Ann’s angle of view didn’t afford her much opportunity to see, and the only light came from an octagonal skylight directly above, and this morning it didn’t offer up much.

But she could tell that in each of the eight walls of this place, there was a curtain, like the one she’d just passed through—one on each level, one on each wall. Each of those curtains, Ann guessed, would lead to another door: and that door would lead to . . . what? A space that would be a slice of the octagon pie. At least as big as the little lounge they’d found themselves in. She found herself mapping it in her head—grasping for some measure of orientation.

Ann approached the railing. Like the finish on the balcony, it was made of dark wood, and the rail was padded with what felt like real leather. She leaned on it, and tried to look down, then up. The lattice of the skylight reminded her of a spider’s web—an effect that she expected was the intent of whichever architect Rickhardt had finally hired to build this thing. It looked like some 18th-century idea of a prison, or an insane asylum, where the cells ringed the atrium, and the guards watched from the middle. A panopticon.

“See, Ann,” said Ian Rickhardt from behind her, “just keep holding on.”

On the other side of the chamber, one of the curtains wavered. Something moved out—Ann was sure she could see it, a small figure—but it was gone as fast as it had come.

“Ann,” said Ian, so close that she could feel his breath on her neck. Ann shifted aside, and turned.

Ian wasn’t there. He was standing an eighth of the way around the balcony, gazing dreamily into the centre. His left arm was hanging out from his body, at about twenty degrees, his fingers curled and spread—

—as though he were holding someone’s hand.

Dr. Sunderland leaned against the wall, beside the curtain they’d just come through. He had his arms folded tight, but despite the body language he didn’t seem perturbed; just cold, like Ann. He motioned her to come closer, and she came.

“It is a poltergeist that is holding Ian’s hand,” he said quietly, nearly whispering it in Ann’s ear, “in case you hadn’t guessed.”

Ann swallowed hard.

“And he thinks it’s me,” she said. “Holding his hand.”

“Oh, I think it’s dawning on him that it’s not,” said Dr. Sunderland. “Look.”

Ian was looking at Ann, and looking down at his hand, his eyes widened in marvel and, Ann supposed, that terror he so craved. Dr. Sunderland smiled.

“It’s one of the games they play,” he said, “before it gets more serious. The spectral hand, holding your own, in the dark. You think that it was your friend’s hand. But when the light comes on, and you say, ‘Thank God you were there holding my hand,’ your friend says: ‘I wasn’t holding your hand.’ It’s an old Shirley Jackson trick.”

“Shirley Jackson?”

“
The Haunting of Hill House
?” said Dr. Sunderland, and regarded Ann. “No? Well I can hardly blame you for staying clear of haunted house novels, given your upbringing. But it’s fair to say that Shirley Jackson’s the Marquis de Sade for the ’geisters.”

The curtain behind Ian billowed, and for only an instant a shadow fell across Ian Rickhardt, and then his shirt billowed too. He bent down, as though he could see something more than just moving shadows, shifting curtains. Sunderland shook his head bemusedly, and pushed himself away from the wall.

“Mr. Rickhardt!” he called. “We do still have business, yes?”

Rickhardt seemed to consider that, but Ann suspected it was for show. “You take care of it,” he said. “I’ll catch up.”

As they watched, he fell to his hands and knees and crawled through the curtains, and was gone.

“The heart wants,” said Charlie Sunderland wryly, “what the heart wants.”

The air seemed to warm as he spoke—or rather, the chill began to flee. Ann felt her shoulders relaxing, and only from that realized how tightly hunched she’d been. Sunderland also flexed his fingers. He looked at Ann.

“Now I will apologize,” said Sunderland. “We’re not all like Rickhardt. Some of us—”

“—are like Hirsch?”

Sunderland nodded. “Some are like him.”

“And you aren’t like either of them.”