The Haunted Air (41 page)

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Authors: F. Paul Wilson

BOOK: The Haunted Air
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Jack approached the Menelaus house warily, the Roger Rabbit key chain tight in his fist. He stepped past the dead bushes onto the front porch and stopped, waiting for something to happen.
After half a minute or so of nothing happening except his feeling a little foolish, he rang the doorbell. When no one answered, he rang it again. Through the screen he heard the faint clank and clatter of banging wood and steel on
stone. Sounded like Lyle and Charlie had started without him.
He pulled open the screen door and hesitated, remembering the first time he'd crossed this threshold—the unearthly scream, the earthly tremor. What would happen this time, now that he was holding something that might have belonged to whatever had invaded this house?
Better play it safe, he thought.
He tossed the key chain into the waiting room and stepped back.
No scream, no tremor. Nothing.
Jack stood and watched Roger lie spread-eagle on the floor, grinning and staring at the ceiling.
A little more waiting, accompanied by a lot more nothing.
Disappointment veered toward anger as Jack stepped through the door and snatched the key chain from the floor. He suppressed the urge to turn and drop kick it onto the front lawn. He'd been so damn
sure.
Ah, well. It was a good try. And he had to admit he was somewhat relieved not to have to face proof that Bellitto was connected to Tara Portman. He'd come to fear coincidences.
He stuffed Roger into a pocket and followed the work noises into the kitchen and down the cellar stairs. Along the way he heard another sound. Music. Jazz. Miles. Something from
Bitches Brew
.
Jack reached the bottom of the steps and stopped to watch the brothers Kenton at work. They'd ditched their shirts and looked surprisingly muscular for a couple of guys in the spook trade. Their black skins glistened from the effort as they pried at the sheets of paneling and hacked at the studs behind them. A ten- or twelve-foot span had been stripped away, exposing dull gray rows of granite block. Neither had any idea he'd arrived.
“Started without me, I see,” Jack said.
Lyle jumped and turned, raising his pry bar. He huffed out a breath and lowered it when he recognized Jack.
“Don't do that!” he said. “Not in this house.”
“Yo, Jack,” Charlie said, waving. “'S'up?”
“Lots. Gia paid a visit to Tara Portman's father.”
“By herself?” Lyle asked.
“Without telling me.”
“That girl got game,” Charlie said. “She learn anything?”
Jack gave them a brief rundown of what Joe Portman had told Gia.
“So,” Lyle said slowly, “the riding clothes she was wearing when Gia saw her match the clothes she was wearing when she was snatched.”
“Don't be fooled,” Charlie said. “It's not Tara Portman.”
Lyle rolled his eyes. “Not this again.”
“You won't listen, maybe Jack will. You had your doubts too, right, Jack?”
“Yeah, but …” What was he stepping into here?
“I spoke to my minister and he says there are no ghosts, only demons pretending to be ghosts to lure the faithful away from God.”
“No worry in my case,” Lyle said. “I'm not among the faithful.”
“That's because you don't believe in anything,” Charlie said with some heat. “Only thing you believe in is your disbelief. Disbelief
is
your religion.”
“Maybe it is. I can't help it. I was born with a skeptical mind.” He turned to his brother. “Now I ask you, is that fair? If God gives me a skeptical nature and you an accepting one, then you're going to be a believer and I'm not. If belief is a ticket to eternal happiness, I'm definitely handicapped. God gives me a mind capable of asking questions and what?—I'm damned if I use it?”
Charlie's dark eyes were sad. “You just gotta give your heart to Jesus, bro. ‘Whosoever believeth in him shall not perish but have everlasting life.'”
“But I can't. That's my point. I'm the type who needs to
know
. I didn't ask to be this way, but that's how it is. I am simply not capable of adjusting my whole existence to accommodate something that must be accepted on faith, on
the word of people I've never met, people who've been dead for thousands of years. I can't live like that. It's not me.” He shrugged. “Hell, I'm still not sure I believe in this ghost.”
“Wait a sec,” Jack said. “What's this about not believing in your ghost? Why are you doing this demolition work then?”
He shrugged. “I'm caught between. Certain aspects of this situation don't jibe.”
“Like what?”
“Well, like that song, for instance. I heard what sounded like a little girl singing. But how can a ghost sing? Or talk, for that matter?”
“If it can smash mirrors and write in dust, why shouldn't it be able to sing and talk?”
“It's got no vocal cords, and no lungs to push air past them if it did. So how does it make noise?”
Jack thought he knew the answer. “Last I heard, noise is nothing more than vibrating air. If this thing can smash a mirror, I'd think it should be able to vibrate air.”
Lyle nodded, grinning. He turned to Charlie. “See? That's what I need. An explanation I can sink my teeth into. Not simply saying ‘It's God's will.' That won't cut it.”
“It will, bro,” Charlie said. “When that final trumpet blows, it will.”
“So you believe.”
“I know, Lyle.”
“That's just it: You
don't
know. And neither do I. Neither of us will ever know until we die.”
This was getting a little heavy. Jack walked over to the exposed granite blocks and ran a hand over the stone. Cold. And clammy. He pulled his hand away. For a moment there it felt as if the surface had shifted under his touch. He looked at his hand, then at the stone. Nothing had changed. He tried it again and felt that same strange, squirming sensation.
“Looking for something?” Lyle asked.
“Just checking out these blocks.”
As he moved to another stone, he glanced back and noticed Lyle staring at him. More than staring—squinting at him, as if trying to bring him into focus.
“Something wrong?”
Lyle blinked. “No. Nothing.”
Jack turned back to the stones. He found one with a cross-shaped pocket and noticed scratch marks in the granite around the depression.
“Didn't the Greek say some of the stones had inlaid crosses?”
“Right,” Lyle said, moving closer. “Brass and nickel.”
Jack ran a finger over the gouges. “Looks like Dmitri was none too gentle in digging them out.”
“Yeah, I noticed those before. I wonder what he did with them?”
“Maybe he used them as grave markers.”
“Maybe he wanted to make the place more hospitable to demons,” Charlie said. “They can't bear the presence of a cross.”
In an effort to head off another, argument that wasn't going to settle anything, Jack grabbed a pry bar and held it up.
“What say we take down the rest of the paneling?”
“Why bother?” Charlie said. “Probably just more of the same.”
Jack jabbed the straight end of the bar through a section of paneling and felt the tip strike the stone beyond. He reversed the bar, shoved the curved end into the opening, and ripped away a chunk of the laminated wood. Despite the nagging tug of discomfort in his flank, it felt good. Sometimes he liked to break things. Liked it a lot.
“Maybe not. We look hard enough, we might find that some of these blocks aren't mortared like the others. That they slide out and there's some sort of hidey hole behind them. Who knows what we'll find there? Maybe what's left of Tara Portman.”
Charlie said, “It's not Tara Portman, I tell you, it's a—”
“Wait.” Lyle held up a hand. “Something's happening.”
Jack looked around. He hadn't heard anything.
“What?”
“Don't you feel it?”
Jack glanced at Charlie who looked just as confused.
“Feel what?”
Lyle turned in a slow circle. “Something's coming.”
Then Jack felt it too. A chill, a sense of
gathering
, as if all the warmth in the room were being sucked into its center to drain away through an invisible black hole there, leaving a steadily growing knot of cold in its place.
Cold stabbed Jack high on his right thigh, so cold it burned. He clutched at the spot and felt a frozen lump in the pocket. The key ring! He clenched his teeth as he dropped to his knees—God, it hurt—and clawed at the pocket, reaching in, trying to grab the key ring but the skin of his fingers stuck to it like a wet tongue to a frozen wrought iron fence. He peeled his fingers away, losing some skin, and yanked at the fabric, pulling it out, inverting the pocket. Finally the Roger Rabbit figure appeared and tumbled toward the floor.
But it never landed. Instead it dipped and then rose and darted toward the center of the cellar. There it hovered in the air. Jack saw a rime of frost form along the figure's limbs, then the head, finally engulfing the trunk.
A high keening wail began to echo the air, growing in pitch and volume as Jack pushed himself back up to his feet. The frost thickened on the Roger Rabbit figure, and Jack thought he heard the plastic creak and crinkle as it became brittle from the intense cold.
Suddenly the wail became a screech of rage as Roger's head snapped off and hurtled across the cellar. It struck one of the granite blocks and shattered into powder that scattered and swirled like drifting snow. Then an arm snapped off and flashed in the opposite direction, just missing Charlie's head. Jack ducked as an arm narrowly missed him.
More pieces flew as the frenzied screech rose in pitch and volume. And then there were no more pieces and yet still the enraged howl rose until Jack had to cover his ears. The sound became a physical thing, battering him until …
It stopped.
As suddenly as the sound had begun, silence returned. The sense of
presence
dissipated as well until Jack felt that the cellar was again occupied by just the three of them.
He shook his head to relieve the ringing in his ears. It didn't work.
Lyle and Charlie looked shaken, but Jack felt oddly calm. Deadly calm.
“What the
hell
was that all about?” Lyle said.
“Yeah,” Charlie said. “What'd you have in your pocket? Looked like that cartoon rabbit …”
“Roger Rabbit.”
“Yeah.”
Lyle snorted a laugh and shook his head. “Roger Rabbit. Just the sort of thing to drive the average demon into a frenzy.”
Charlie took a step toward his brother. “Warning you, Lyle—”
Jack jumped in. “Tara Portman's father told Gia that Tara was a Roger Rabbit fan. I was wondering if that key ring might be hers.”
“Judging from what just happened,” Lyle said, bending and rubbing his finger through the powdery remains of one of Roger's legs, “I think she answered you with a very big
yes
.”
“That she did,” Jack said, nodding. “And she also identified her killer.”
But his satisfaction at solving the mystery was marred by the unanswered question of how and why he'd come to be involved.
Gia sat in a pew three-quarters back from the altar under the vaulted ceiling and waited for peace.
She'd taken a slow walk from Sutton Square down to St. Patrick's Cathedral. She wasn't sure why she'd come, hadn't consciously headed this way. She'd simply gone for a walk as a break from painting and found herself on Fifth Avenue. She ambled past St. Pat's and then doubled back to visit, hoping to find some of the serenity and inner peace religion was supposed to bring. So far it remained elusive.
The sense of isolation was welcome, though. Here in this huge, stone-wrapped space she felt cut off from the bustling reality just beyond the tall oak doors and insulated from the need that called to her from that house in Astoria.
She sat alone and watched the gaggles of tourists wandering in and out, the Catholics blessing themselves with holy water and lighting candles, the rest standing around and gawking at the gothic arches, the stations of the cross spaced along the side walls, the larger-than-life statues, the giant crucifix, the gilded altar.
The images drew Gia back to her years in Our Lady of Hope grammar school in Ottumwa. Not a particularly Catholic town, but then Iowa wasn't a particularly Catholic state. There'd been enough Catholic kids to fill the local church school though, and keep the nuns of the convent busy as teachers. Of all that black-robed crew, she best remembered Sister Mary Barbara—known to all the kids as Sister Mary Barbed-wire. Not because she'd liked the nun; quite the opposite: she'd scared the hell out of Gia.
Sister Mary Barbed-wire had been the Catholic equivalent of a Baptist hellfire preacher, always harping on the
awful punishments awaiting sinners, all the horrors the God of Love would inflict upon those who disappointed Him. Everlasting suffering for missing mass on Sunday, or failing to make your Easter duty. Little Gia bought the whole package, living in terror of dying with a mortal sin on her soul.
Luckily Our Lady of Hope hadn't had a high school; that allowed Gia to escape to the secular den of iniquity known as the public school system. But she'd still remained a practicing Catholic, attending CCD classes and CYO dances.
Sometime during the eighties, however, she drifted away and never returned. Not that she stopped believing in God. She couldn't buy into atheism, or even agnosticism. God existed, she was sure. She was also pretty sure He didn't care much about what went on here. Maybe He watched, but He certainly didn't act.
To her child's eyes the Old Testament God had appeared stern and imposing; now He seemed like a cranky, petulant adolescent with poor impulse control, creating cataclysms, sending plagues, striking down an entire nation's first-born males. She found the New Testament God much more appealing, but somewhere along the way the whole redemption and damnation thing had stopped making sense to her. You didn't ask to be born but once you were you had to toe the belief line or spend eternity suffering in hell. Easy to believe back in the Old Testament days when He burned bushes, parted seas, and sent commandments on stone tablets. But these days God had become remote, no longer weighing in on human affairs, yet still demanding faith. It didn't seem fair.
Of course, if You're God, You don't have to be fair. You hold all the marbles. What You say goes.
Still …
Gia had tried to come back to the church after Vicky was born. A child should have some moral foundation to build on, and the church seemed a tried and true place to start. In the back of her mind too had been the idea that if Gia returned to the fold, God would protect Vicky.
But Gia couldn't make it work. And it was terrifyingly obvious that God did not protect children. They died from brain tumors and leukemias and other cancers, from being run over, shot, electrocuted, dropped from buildings, incinerated in house fires, and in other uncountable, unimaginable ways. Clearly innocence was not enough to earn God's protection.
So where was God?
Did the Born Agains have it right? Jesus was their personal savior who watched their every move and answered their prayers? They prayed to Jesus that their old jalopy would start on a cold morning and if it did they praised Him and gave Him thanks for the rest of the day. Gia couldn't get comfortable with a view of God that turned the Creator of the Universe into some sort of cosmic errand boy for His True Believers. Children were starving, Tara Portmans were being abducted and murdered, political prisoners were being tortured, wives were being abused, but God ignored their pleas for relief in order to answer the True Believers' prayers for good weather on the day of the church picnic. Did that make sense?
Yet when she considered the Born Agains she knew—only a few, but good people who seemed to practice what they preached—and saw their serenity, their inner peace, she envied them. They could say, “Let go, let God,” with a true, unshakable confidence that God would take care of them and everything would work out in the end. Gia wanted that tranquillity for herself, craved it, but the ability—perhaps the hubris—to believe she mattered to the Creator of the Universe and could have His ear remained beyond her.
At the other extreme was the God who ignited the Big Bang, then turned His back and walked away, never to be seen again.
Gia sensed the truth lay somewhere between. But where?
And where did Tara Portman fit in all this? Had she come back on her own, or had she been sent back? And why? Why did Gia feel this connection to her?
Gia sighed and rose. Whatever the reasons, she wasn't going to find them here.
She stepped out into the bright afternoon sunshine and headed home. When she reached Sutton Square she ran into Rosa, the Silverman's maid. Their townhouse was two doors down from Gia.
“Did that policeman find you?” Rosa said. She had a broad face and a thick body, and was dressed in her after-work street clothes.
Gia's heart froze. “What policeman?”
“The one who knock on your door little while ‘go.”
Oh, God! Vicky! Something's happened!
She fumbled in her bag for her keys. “What did he say? What did he want?”
“He ask if you home. He ask if you leave you little girl home alone when you go out.”
“What?” She found the keys, singled out the one for the front door. “Did he say why he wanted to know?”
“No. I tol' him no, never. I say little miss away at camp. He ask what camp, I say I don' know.”
Gia's knees weakened with relief. For a moment there she'd thought the camp had sent a cop to deliver terrible news about Vicky. But if he hadn't even known she was away …
Wait a minute. What was he doing here then? Why was a cop asking about Vicky?
“Rosa, are you sure he was a cop?”
“Oh sure. He have cop car and …” She moved her hands up and down the front of her body. “You know …”
“Uniform?”
“Uh-huh! Tha's it. All blue. He was cop, yes.”
“Did you happen to see his badge number?”
The maid shook her head. “No. I no think to look.” She narrowed her eyes. “Now that I think, I don' remember seeing no badge.”
“Did he mention me or Vicky by name?”
“No … I don' thin' so.”
“Thank you, Rosa.” Gia missed her first try on inserting
the key, made it on the second. “I'm going to look into this.”
Once inside the first thing Gia did was call the camp. No, they hadn't called the NYPD. Vicky and everyone else at the camp were fine.
Next call, her local precinct, the Seventeenth. No, they hadn't had any calls to send someone over to Sutton Square. He might have come from another precinct, but no one could say why.
Gia hung up, relieved that Vicky was safe, but unsettled by anyone, cop or not, asking about her daughter.
Had he been an impostor? No, Rosa had said he'd arrived in a cop car.
Gia thought of Tara Portman. What if Tara had been picked up by a police car? A cop saying her mother had been hurt and he'd take her to her. Vicky would fall for that. Any kid would.
Whoever the cop was, he hadn't learned anything other than the fact that Vicky was away at camp. And he didn't know which camp because Rosa couldn't tell him.
She wanted to call Jack, but what could he do? He was the last person on earth to have an inside line into what the NYPD might be up to.
All she could do was pray that—
Gia frowned. Pray … that was what you did when trouble came knocking. Even if you'd lost your faith, old habits died hard.
She'd pray that it was all a mix-up and the cop had the wrong address.
That would do until Jack got home.

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