The Haunting of James Hastings (34 page)

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Authors: Christopher Ransom

Tags: #Fiction, #Action & Adventure, #Suspense

BOOK: The Haunting of James Hastings
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No. Not at first, anyway.
 
Later, after his wife left him, when he became obsess—
 
There was something else in the footlocker, buried under the magazines. I set the CD aside. It was a black binder, a scrapbook full of plastic sleeves. I opened it. The sleeves were full of news clippings. The first headline said,
PARENTS CLAIM SUICIDAL SON OBSESSED WITH RAPPER
 
 
 
My heart stuttered.
This is it, this is what happened to Aaron.
But, no, this article was about a boy of sixteen named Brian Jennings, of Dallas. I’d never heard of or read about him, and doubted Ghost had either. He didn’t like to hear bad news. Brian Jennings had come home for lunch one day, painted his face white with clown make-up, and hanged himself in the garage.
 
I turned the page.
 
TEACHER ASSAULTED FOR CONFISCATING GHOST
 
 
Carl Sanders, forty-three, of Newark. A high school social studies teacher who had taken an iPod away from one of his students. The iPod contained only one artist, Ghost’s third album,
American Bloodland
. The student, who had been chanting the lyrics and making a nuisance of himself all week, went berserk. Mr Sanders was kicked and beaten savagely in front of his class. He spent three days in a coma, and, while a partial recovery was expected, Mr Sanders would never teach again due to the brain trauma he suffered.
 
On the opposite page,
PAROLED SEX OFFENDER USED GHOST TIX TO LURE SIXTH-GRADERS
 
 
 
I scanned the article. It made no mention of Aaron Copeland, and the pederast had been caught trolling suburbs outside of Indianapolis.
 
MADISON SCHOOL SHOOTER’S DIARY REVEALS OBSESSION WITH RAPPER
 
 
This one I remembered. Stacey and I had argued about it several times, and it had made international headlines, plastering the cable channels for weeks. A Hmong exchange student with a history of at least three mental illnesses had recorded video of himself at home in his basement, posing with Tec-9s while Ghost’s chart-topping single ‘Hot Lunch’ played in the background. Thirty-two minutes later he had entered his high school cafeteria and shot eleven students and the custodian before turning one of the guns on himself. Neither the boy nor the media paused to reflect that the song was written as a eulogy, told from the point of view of a fictional girl who had survived the Columbine massacre, the unfolding horror of which, Ghost claimed, left an indelible impression on him when he was nineteen, touching notes of outrage and empathy in him from twelve hundred miles away. It was one of the first songs he ever wrote, before he even had a recording contract.
 
In 2006, Ghost performed ‘Hot Lunch’ at the Grammys as a duet with Sting, and later donated an undisclosed amount of proceeds from the single to the prevention of school violence. If you studied the lyrics, which were brutal but heartfelt, rippling with outrage and nuance that went far beyond sentiment and pop-culture references, you understood it was a work of art, an ingenious and haunting cry for honesty about America’s love affair with guns, and a call for parental responsibility. Of course, the media took a handful of lines out of context and slapped them under the real killer’s chilling self-video, turning Ghost into more fodder for the censorship warriors and a scapegoat for grieving parents. As the evangelists arrived outside his gated St Louis compound waving pitchforks, Ghost became apoplectic. He was hurt. He issued his only written response to this kind of thing, defending himself and the importance of music as a means to reach young people and help them consider society’s ills, but he did so too late and it was buried beneath the next wave of national news, a political sex scandal.
 
I needed to find Aaron’s hot lunch. I read on, hypnotized by the paper clippings and articles printed from internet news sites.
 
FOUR YOUTHS SUSPECTED OF GANG RAPE OUTSIDE GHOST CONCERT
 
TWELVE-YEAR-OLD CHARGED IN TWENTY-TWO CAT KILLINGS, CITES RAPPER
 
 
 
DORM MONITOR RAPIST USES ‘GHOST’ DEFENSE, CLAIMS HE WAS HAUNTED
 
 
BROOKLYN MAN BEHEADS WIFE WHILE SINGING GHOST SONG
 
 
MIDDLE SCHOOL GHOST-TEENS TORCH REPUTED GAY TAVERN
 
The lurid headlines throbbed before me. There were dozens of them, but none mentioned Annette, Aaron or Arthur Copeland. I wanted to leave, run downstairs, get in the car and drive to another state. But the secret was in here, I was certain. I had to find out what happened, why Aaron had collected these.
 
No, that was stupid. Of course Aaron had not been the one to save these. Annette or Arthur had. Why? Did they blame Ghost for whatever had happened to Aaron? Did Arthur kill himself out of guilt, or had she blamed his death on Ghost too?
 
I didn’t even know for sure that Aaron was dead, or that he was her son. But why else would she preserve the room this way? Keep all this Ghost memorabilia? Why hadn’t she told me about him? She had told me her husband was responsible for Stacey’s death. That required some courage. What was so bad about Aaron that she needed to hide it? Pretend he did not even exist?
 
Nervous, wired now, I began flipping the pages too quickly. I stopped, went back to the middle, to read them more carefully:
PSYCHOLOGISTS SEE RISE IN PATIENTS TREATED FOR ‘EVIL RECORDINGS’
 
 
 
I didn’t have to read very far into this one to discredit the psychologist who provided the most provocative quote. ‘It’s not so much the content,’ Dr Paul Brown of the Institute for a Brighter America said. ‘This music presents extreme violence, pornography and drug abuse not as tragedies but as episodic cartoons, a sort of consequence-free funhouse where anything goes. It’s destroying in forty-some minutes what parents spend years trying to instill in their children - namely, values and common decency.’ Dr Brown was on the board of a right-wing lobbying firm that had been waging war on the First Amendment for almost two decades. He had simply moved on from Judas Priest to Ghost.
 
SALVAGGIO DEATH RULED SUICIDE, WIFE BLAMES HOUSING BUBBLE FOR HUSBAND’S DEPRESSION
 
 
This was different. There was no mention of Ghost but—
 
A soft but urgent scraping noise in the hallway whispered at me, disrupting the silence. I closed the scrapbook quickly, wincing from the slap of plastic. I started to close the footlocker’s lid, then realized I had left the CD on the floor. I grabbed it as the scraping sound started again. I stood holding the copy of
Autotopsy
, afraid to move.
 
Scoosh-ush, scoosh-ush, scoosh-ush.
 
The sound of feet dragging along carpet drew nearer to Aaron’s bedroom, but stopped short of entering. I didn’t want to be confronted by Annette. She was supposed to be fast asleep three doors down. Was she sneaking up on me? I would not call out to her. She would have to break cover first. Maybe she was just using the hallway bathroom and had not realized I was in Aaron’s room.
 
I waited, the guilt mounting exponentially. For being in Aaron’s room and sifting through his belongings, and for whatever she thought Ghost had done. I had never robbed a grave, but I imagined the feeling being similar to this, the sense of being an intruder, of being watched by the dead.
 
The swishing footsteps started again, coming closer now.
 
The room was cold. I was dizzy, my legs stiff from crouching. It was morning and the sun was not high enough to warm the house yet, but Aaron’s room was colder than could be explained by the time of day. The steps sounded too small and too light to belong to an adult.
 
Was he in the hall, peering around the doorway now? The energy in the room changed, grew heavier. I was certain he was already inside, standing behind me in his blue blazer with the private school crest, watching me with his vacant eyes. The room smelled like boy, an unwashed smell mixed with bubble-gum fumes and the stale earthen decay of his shallow grave.
 
Something wooden creaked. A door frame, the door opening a little wider. I turned around and was confronted by an empty bedroom. No one was standing in the doorway. But I
felt
him there. It was just like the street. When I turned around, he disappeared.
 
I turned back to the footlocker and he moved toward me with a sound like ruffling paper. I stared at the wall, seized. He was close enough to reach out and touch my back. The whole house seemed to be pressing down on me, as if we were in a submersible sinking deeper into the ocean.
 
Had he died here, at home? Is that why this was happening?
 
Delicate fingers slid down the small of my back, followed by a gentle tugging at my shirt tail. My left hand fell to my side, dropping the copy of
Autotopsy
. It hit the carpeting softly and fell open. Before I could focus on the case, his small hand took mine, palm to palm, squeezing, as if imploring me to go for a walk. His hand was stiff and cold and it held me in a pocket of his grotesque aura. He sighed with contentment, his little boy breath cold on my wrist. This was followed by the crack of plastic.
 
I began to turn, watching my toes sink into the carpet so that I did not have to look into his pale face, see his mouth hanging open. His grip loosed itself and the last of his touch slipped from my hand in a paper-thin draft.
 
There was no one in his room but me. I exhaled.
 
My mind was playing tricks on me.
 
I noticed the CD on the floor. The booklet with the liner notes had sprung free of the jewel case. It was bent open to the gatefold, its spine creased horizontally over the staple to keep it from flapping shut.
 
Ghost was looking up at me.
 
I remembered the photos used for this mini-spread, of course. The grotto shots of Ghost hiding in an alley, lurking behind a dumpster with a machete in one hand, his black hooded sweatshirt hiding most of his face, everything but a moon slice of white jawline and the demonic eyes. Just like the boy who had been following me, dressing up not as a Ghost fan, but like Ghost himself. I remembered the feelings I had when I began to work for him and revisited his albums, to study him. I had been a casual fan, but as his employee and double I needed to know his work like it was my own. I remembered comparing the photos of him to the man I saw in the mirror, now that I had acquired his look. The actor’s urge to act. Could I go there? Be this dark personality? The strangely intoxicating sense of me in there, not him, our roles reversed, the monster he was pretending to be a real demon hiding inside of me. I remembered the drops of blood dripping from his blade, the little pool of red on the ground at his feet, shining like bar sign neon in puddles. But I did not remember the arterial streaks and splatters that escaped the main photo and splashed across the gatefold, the quantity of the blood.
 
I did not remember these cinematic touches because none of the fourteen million copies of
Autotopsy
in existence had been printed with Photoshopped blood splatters
outside
of the photos themselves.
 
I bent over and plucked the booklet from the floor, careful to keep the spread open, pinching it by the edges the way a detective bags evidence. The blood was fresh, still wet. I dabbed it with my finger, right where someone with a tiny paintbrush, or very small fingertip, had defaced Ghost’s hooded countenance with an accusation:
ghOst KilLer
 
 
 
I flexed my hand, opening the stinging smile in my wrist where the dead boy had cut me, and more of my blood began to spill onto the floor.
 
32
 
The cut along my wrist looked like I had tried to do myself in. I ran downstairs with it wrapped in my shirt, intent upon dialing 9-1-1, but it wasn’t bleeding very much by the time I got to the phone, and I realized no veins or arteries had been severed. I washed my arm in the kitchen sink and kept a wad of paper towels around it until I located a pack of bandages under the first-floor bathroom sink. I used the largest square in the pack, the one you hope you will never have to resort to, and two smaller ones on the sides as tape, until the whole works seemed to be good and sealed off.
 
I was an exhausted mess. Dirty, hungover, running on almost no sleep.

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