The Ghost in Love (34 page)

German's voice went soft and slow with dismay. “You wanted to
hit
me? Is that true? You hated me that much?”

As if in answer to her question, something hard hit her on the leg. German gasped, grabbed her knee, and looked down to see what it was. A jagged piece of rose quartz the size of an ink bottle lay on the ground next to her foot. Someone in the crowd had thrown a rock at her.

She looked at the Asian woman again but got only a cold stare in return. Out of the corner of her eye, German saw a child fling something else at her. Quickly raising an arm, she blocked a fat clod of earth.

“Ben! Help!”

He glanced over, grasped immediately what was happening and came running. Another stone flew near but missed her. Ben stopped in front of German and shielded her with his body. He shouted at the crowd, “What the hell are you doing? Huh? What the
hell
are you doing?”

“Exactly what you wanted to do to her when she left,” the Asian woman said.

Ben's body went rigid. “Never! I never wanted to hurt German. Never!”

“Liar!” a bald man howled at him.

“Don't lie!” yelled the kid who'd thrown the dirt bomb.

“We're you, Ben; we know exactly what you wanted. Don't try to lie to us about it.”

German touched his back. “Is it true? Did you really want to hit me?”

“No, never! It's not true.”

“Liar!”

“Why are you lying to her? We know everything: we're you!”

Good God, was it true?
Had
Ben really wanted to hit German after she left him? He'd never hit anyone in his life, not even when he was a kid. But hearing this now rattled him because, digging down deep into his memory, he had to admit that, well, yes, possibly for a few poisonous, self-absorbed moments or an hour or maybe even a whole day it might have been true: he might have wanted to physically lash out at his great love for abandoning him. At that time he
was
distraught and confused. Perhaps yes, some despicable part of him slithered out from its dark psychic well and wanted to punish her for leaving when he needed her most. Was that true? Was that part really a strand of Ben Gould's genetic code?

“Get out of the way,” the Asian woman commanded.

“What?”

“Get out of the way. Stop blocking her.”

Ben felt German move closer to his back.

“No. Get out of here—all of you. If you
are
some part of me, then I'm ordering you to get out.”

They didn't move. The bald man said, “She deserves it for what she did. Let us give her what she deserves.”

“She doesn't ‘deserve' anything,” Ben protested. “I drove her away by how I behaved. It was
my
fault: I was crazy. You know that. I
don't want anything bad happening to German. Nothing. Never. I love her.”

“Yeah, you say that now. But back then part of you wanted to—”

“Don't
touch
her. Put down those rocks and leave.”

Ignoring Ben, they moved closer. He could not stop them. He could not stop himself. More people from the larger crowd were coming over—more and more.

“I don't want you here. If you
are
me, then I'm telling all of you to get away.”

The Asian woman said, “You can't
order
us because you already set us loose. You can't take back your anger. Once it's out, it's out there forever. We're all here: anger, self-hatred, fear; you can't stop it after its loose. It's the same with everyone.”

Frustrated and feeling fear in his belly, Ben wailed, “It's
my
life! I own it!”

“You do absolutely; you're in charge of everything,” she agreed. “You decided to open the box and let us out. But once it happened, you lost control over us. Every person has an ugly Pandora's box, Ben. It's always their choice whether or not to open it.

“What's in the box? You at your worst. Bad Ben, weak Ben, the jealous, the scared, the vengeful, the petty, the self-pitying Ben . . . You know every one of us.

“The difference now is this new you is going to have to deal with all of us at the same time till you die. All the Ben Goulds, all here, right now. Before, you were able to separate and ignore us, but not anymore.

“That's where your new powers come from: Everyone's home now at the Gould house. Everyone turned on their lights at the same time. It's ten times brighter in here than it used to be, but that's not necessarily a good thing.”

Something nearby made a deep slow growl. Pilot came into view
a few feet away. Growling and staring at the crowd, he stopped next to Ben.

“Pilot—hey, you're back.”

“Oh, Pilot,” German said, so glad to see him. But when she bent down to touch him, the dog moved away.

Pilot lifted his head and sniffed. “I smell them. They all smell like you, Ben.”

“I know.”

“I smell their hatred.”

Ben looked at the dog. “What do you mean? They hate me?”

“Of course we hate you,” the Asian woman answered. “We hate that you get to live now, while we're only little pieces of your past. We hate that you won't make the same mistakes we did because you've learned what to avoid. We especially hate that you know things we didn't—things that would have made life so much easier for us back in our day. And the pain we experienced would have been ten times less crippling.”

As she spoke, everything she said made perfect sense. Listening to her was hearing from an unknown part of himself that had never opened its mouth before. It had so much to say. Many of the remarks stunned or touched Ben so deeply that after a while he tuned out her voice, because his circuits overloaded. For a short time he withdrew into the deepest recesses of his mind to recoup and reevaluate. When he came back to the moment he heard her say, “And that's why we sent Stewart Parrish to stop you. That's why we'll never let you succeed no matter how long you live.”

He was incredulous. “Why not?”

“Because we hate you, Ben. We do not wish you well.”

The large group standing behind her really liked that line. Many of them applauded.

“How can you say that? How can you want to do that? You
are
me!”

“Past tense. You get to live tomorrow, but we don't. We were yesterday.”

Ben spoke slowly, as if talking to a retarded child. “But
you—are—me
. If I live tomorrow, you live tomorrow.”

Broomcorn, who had joined the group, wiggled his index finger no and said, “When it was our turn to live, we were you one hundred percent. But now we're just memories and past actions, some forgotten Wednesday when you were twenty-six. Most memories are only a few leftover cells in your body: nothing special or important. Who wants to be that? We used to be the whole Gould—the whole angry Gould. The whole scared and scarred Ben. We want that again, but since it's impossible, then we'll make life impossible for whichever you
is
living right this minute. That's a guarantee.”

Before Broomcorn could say another word, Pilot ran forward and bit him.

Pilot was no longer
a young dog but he was still a sexy one. Earlier, when he had smelled the electric perfume of a female poodle in high heat, he took off after her like a puppy in pursuit of the miraculous. But a dog's sense of smell is so acute that it took only a mile for him to realize that what had traveled the air to beckon him was no poodle but a skillful fake. Sniffing carefully, he discerned that this ersatz odor was missing both the correct top and bottom notes, and that fact made him stop running. He gave it another chance, though, just to be sure. Standing stock-still on the sidewalk, Pilot closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. Nope—that was not a real female-in-heat smell.

By then he was almost a mile and a half from Danielle's building. Not thinking there was a need to hurry back, he turned around and
trotted in that direction. In his whole life he had never smelled a false female. He wondered how such a thing was possible. The more he thought about it, the less he liked the coincidence that this irresistible aroma had appeared just when all that other stuff at Danielle's place was happening. He didn't think it was a coincidence and, apprehensive now, he quickened his pace.

A tortoise-colored Manx cat appeared on the other side of the street. It gave Pilot one of those sly, supercilious looks of cool superiority and quick dismissal that the dog detested. Who did cats think they were? But chasing them brought him no pleasure. Cats were barely clever enough to dupe gullible fools into thinking they were mysterious. Fat chance. Any animal that played contentedly with a dangling piece of string for half an hour was neither mysterious nor worth the effort of chasing and killing.

A few minutes later, on encountering a still-warm, dripping, juicy steak bone lying on the sidewalk directly in front of him, Pilot recognized these seductive diversions one right after the other as part of a plan. Someone was trying to waylay him, divert his pilgrim's progress, and keep him from rejoining Ben and German. Pilot hated tricks. He also hated being tricked. Beginning to trot, he was positive someone had tricked him big-time into taking off after that hot fake poodle.

But getting back to his owners was not easy. As if it knew that Pilot had figured out what was going on, whatever was trying to stop him had a teenager on a silver Razor scooter whiz by and kick him hard enough in the neck so that Pilot yelped and almost fell down. But that didn't stop him. A short time later a car roared out of a driveway and narrowly missed running him over. Next a gigantic crow dive-bombed the dog's head, aiming for his eyes as Pilot passed under the oak tree where the bird was perched.

Pilot could have tried speaking to the black bird to ask who'd sent it. But right now was not the time to interrogate an alien species known for its mendacity. And besides, the worst was coming right at him.

Or rather, the unsuspecting dog was moving
toward
its Waterloo. Waiting for him in the next block was a surprise attack, plain and simple. When Pilot was halfway down the sidewalk, a teenager angry at her parents threw open her bedroom window, turned her stereo speakers toward the street, and blasted Neil Young's awful song “Heart of Gold” out into the unprepared ears of the world. Even worse, precisely the part of the song where the harmonica solo comes in.

Pilot stopped dead in his tracks despite the importance of his mission. The dog did not like Neil Young's thin, strangled voice, but he really detested harmonica music. Some human beings dissolve at the sound of a dentist's drill, fingernails on a blackboard, or a knife scratching across a dinner plate. Many dogs have an identical reaction to the sound of a harmonica. Pilot not only loathed it; just the sound of the instrument playing usually paralyzed him. It had been that way since the first time he heard it years before when his then owner played this very same Neil Young song.

Any creature's first orgasm introduces it to a new level of joy. Neil Young's harmonica solo that day had exactly the opposite effect on Pilot the poor puppy. Fast asleep, on hearing the first notes for the first time, he sprang up as if the floor beneath his belly had suddenly caught fire. Instinctively the petrified young dog threw back his head and howled his full horror against the noise assaulting his poor innocent ears.

For the rest of his life, harmonica music always had that same frenzied effect on Pilot: the moment he heard it he would freeze, close his eyes, and wail at the gods to please make it stop.

Whoever came up with this strategy today was especially sadistic because, instead of letting the song continue after the harmonica solo finished, the villain had fiendishly looped it so that the solo played over and over again. Like a death ray in a corny science fiction movie, the unrelenting harmonica zapped the dog into dementia and he began to howl, sounding like a cross between a rooster at dawn and an Arkansas pig auctioneer.

Thank God for sex. Almost as soon as the harmonica began its third hellish repetition, even through his wail Pilot once again smelled sex. Squinting his glazed eyes and shaking his head many times, he managed to break the fiendish grip of the music and stumble drunkenly away down the sidewalk. The smell of sex managed to shove the music aside. The aroma of a female dog in heat triumphed again and made him move his body toward it even though the harmonica assassin continued its assault. The music even got louder the farther away he moved, as if it were chasing after Pilot, but still he managed to escape. A distance that would have normally taken him five minutes to cover took fifteen, but finally the harmonica was only background noise, whereas the scent of the female was all-consuming.

Pilot was walking almost normally when he saw the white animal at the end of the next block. Halfway to it he was clearheaded enough to recognize that it was a verz.

The white animal with dark squiggles on its body spoke to Pilot in a breathless rush. “It took you long enough! Come on, let's go.”

“Wait a minute. What's going on? What just happened back there?”

“You should know the answer to that. They were trying to stop you from getting back to Ben and German. They almost succeeded.”

Pilot then noticed that the smell that had pulled him there, effectively saving him, had disappeared. “It's gone—the smell.”

The verz started to move. “It was never there. You only created it in your head to get you out of there.”

Pilot was dumbfounded. “I made that smell? There was no girl?”

The verz said, “Only in your imagination. Come on, we have to hurry.”

“But how'd I do that?” Normally a cool customer who rarely raised his voice about anything, Pilot now sounded like an eager child who's just seen a magic trick performed.

“Ask Ben when you see him. He gave you the power to do it.”

“
Ben
gave me the power?”