Wildest Dreams (10 page)

5

The rain fell harder now, sheeting across the highway. The storm was getting worse, and it showed no sign of letting up anytime soon. No way did I want to rely on a busted-up Toyota that had been to hell and back when Janice’s new Ford Explorer was ripe for the taking.

The self-important scribbler didn’t need it now. I was doing the driving. Janice rode shotgun, though that was a laugh. She wouldn’t have touched a gun if one lay in her lap. She was that scared.

Maybe she was scared enough to tell the truth.

“I was supposed to be Circe’s ghostwriter, if you can believe that,” Janice began. “She had an offer in the high six figures from a publisher who wanted her autobiography, and she handpicked me to write it. How could I refuse? Slice up a pie like that, there was plenty left for me. My agent negotiated the deal and managed to make it a little sweeter. In fact, she bumped us over the million dollar mark. When it came to Circe Whistler, she said there was a lot more money in channeling the living than channeling the dead.”

“Celebrities sell,” I said.

“All I wanted was the money.”

“There are lots of ways to make money.”

“You’re right. If you can kill people and and cut off their heads, I’m sure the job offers just roll right in.”

“Spare me the wounded sarcasm. You’re a smart woman. I’m not much on metaphysics, but I read a chapter from one of your books. You can write.”

“You know how hard it is to sell a book?” Janice asked, and it wasn’t the kind of question that called for an answer. “It’s hard. I know. I couldn’t sell my first two. I had to publish them myself. I lost money on both of them. If it wasn’t for my gift, I would have starved.”

Her talented hands rested on her thighs, silver bracelets gathered like manacles. I knew Janice wasn’t lying about her powers. When it came to psychic impressions from physical objects, I had no doubt that she was the real deal. She had to be. One touch from her fingers and she’d known all about my knife and the things I had done with it. There was no way she could beg, borrow, or steal that information from anyone on earth, living or dead.

But with a wild talent like that, I didn’t understand how money could have been a problem for her. “Seems to me that you could have made plenty of money with your powers alone,” I said.

“Sure. But people don’t want to know the truth. Not really. They can’t take it. The truth isn’t worth a dime. It’s ugly. Pretty lies are the things that sell.”

“And you sold more than your share.”

“That’s right. Pretty lies were my stock and trade. Bring me a couple grand and your dead husband’s pipe, and I’d give you a show. I’d sit you down in a cozy little new-age parlor in front of a roaring fire, and I’d hold that pipe in my hands, and I’d close my eyes as if I were closing them for the very last time. I’d pretend to contact my spirit guide, Natasha Orlovsky, one of the Cliffside witches. Never mind that Natasha was never a witch at all, just a scared teenager who was hanged as a result of mass hysteria. Never mind that I’d never seen Natasha’s ghost, or that the Natasha I pretended to conjure up was a recycled character from a historical horror novel I sold under a pen name for a quick two grand.

“Never mind any of that. I’d close my eyes, and I’d smile, and I’d whisper a few lines of college Russian. Then I’d tell my client what she wanted to hear, whispering in soothing tones that her dear departed husband was so happy in the afterlife, so glad that his widow had remarried that nice fellow who owned the hardware store, so pleased that she’d spent that extra fifteen hundred bucks for a burial plot near a fountain because listening to those sweet little songbirds splashing around sure did make his eternal slumber a lot more comfortable.

“If that was what the old lady wanted to hear, that was what I’d tell her. And I’d hold on to her dead husband’s pipe, even though holding it was like swallowing poison. I’d think of the two grand the old lady had in her purse—the same amount of money I got for a horror novel that took four months of solid work to write. And while I thought of the old lady’s money and how fast I was going to make it mine, I could almost taste the dead man’s tobacco in my mouth, and I could almost feel that rough little lump growing inside my cheek, the one that turned into a cancer that the doctors hacked off along with a good chunk of jawbone.

“I’d feel the dead man’s hate as his wife pretended she needed something from the hardware store, when he knew she only wanted to cry on the shoulder of the cross-eyed bastard who owned the place. I’d feel all of it, just the way the dead man had felt it.

“In a finger snap, I’d live the day his wife came home with the news that the cross-eyed bastard was hiring her twenty hours a week. She hated to go to work, but she didn’t see how they could turn down the income. And she was right about that. They did need money. He couldn’t work anymore. Hell, no one wanted to go to a barber who was missing half his face.

“So he wasn’t going to stop her from working. Or blowing the cross-eyed son of a bitch in the back room. Or whatever else she was getting paid to do. Because with her out of the house he could spend the long afternoons sucking on his pipe with the little asshole mouth the doctors had left him. Holding that sweet smoke in his mouth while he imagined his wife bent over a display of garbage disposals, giving it up for the cross-eyed bastard she’d marry as soon as she buried his cancer-ridden corpse in a boneyard with a fountain that attracted flocks of birds which would no doubt shit all over his tombstone at every opportunity.”

Janice drew a deep breath and held it. If she wanted to confess, I’d let her. Maybe the time had come.

“That was why you didn’t shake my hand when we first met,” I said. “And why you didn’t want to touch the backpack.”

“I can’t stand to touch anything anymore. That’s what ruined me as a medium. After a while I couldn’t hold the pain, and smile, and tell those pretty lies. It started to burn me down. I knew I had to make a change.”

“What about your third book? It was a big hit, wasn’t it? You must have seen some money from that.”

“And I earned every penny. To make the kind of sales my publisher expected, I had to do a book tour. That meant dozens of interviews, and lots of people wanting to test me.”

“Lots of little old ladies wanting to hand you their dead husbands’ pipes.”

“Exactly. I came home from the tour with a deal for another book, but I was burned out. I locked myself in the house for a couple months. I tried to write, but I was completely blocked. I couldn’t stand to go out. Complete strangers seemed to know everything about me.” She laughed. “It was my own fault. Like every neophyte celebrity, I’d given it up to
People
. They printed all my pretty lies, but that wasn’t enough. People wanted more. They always want more, until they’re done with you. All I wanted was to be left alone.

“That was when Circe Whistler entered my life. I knew she lived in Cliffside, but we’d never met. She called me out of the blue and suggested we get together for lunch at her place. Somehow, I felt that I could talk to her. Or maybe it was just that I’d been cooped up alone for so long, I would have talked to the first person who showed me some sympathy. Anyway, I trusted Circe instantly. By the time lunch was over, I’d spilled my guts. I told her everything.”

“Why?”

“I think….” Janice hesitated. “I don’t know why…but I think that somehow Circe saw right through me, and she
made
me talk. I started to think that maybe…well, just
maybe
there really was some truth to the things that Diabolos Whistler preached, and maybe Circe, being his daughter—”

I laughed. “Now, that sounds like the prettiest lie of all.”

“I know! It sounds crazy. I don’t believe it—not in my head, anyway. But my gut tells me something else.”

“Okay. Say you’re not lying. Say Circe seduced you with dark promises of juicy book deals and large royalty checks. But something else must have happened, something that brought you to the point where you found yourself picking up the guy who cut off her father’s head.”

“When you put it that way, I wonder what happened myself.”

Janice was quiet for a while. I left her to her silence, and I kept my eyes on the road. I didn’t want to miss the turnoff. The rain was hammering now. Loud, hollow, ringing on the truck cab like it was empty, like we weren’t inside it at all.

I flicked the wipers on high. They whipped back and forth, fast and sure, beating like purposeful metronomes.

The sound made me uneasy. I felt like I was marching in step, like something beyond my control was directing my actions.

Those thoughts were for someone like Janice Ravenwood. I tried to banish them from my mind, but they stayed with me as I raced forward through the storm, as the wipers lashed back and forth, keeping time, setting the pace. The tempo didn’t slow, and neither did I. Not long enough to gather my thoughts or consider my actions. The wipers beat time, and my foot pressed hard on the gas pedal, and the truck roared forward, carrying us to a place we had to go, the only place I could go.

Then, just as quickly as it had come, the moment ended. Janice started talking again, her voice more confident now, as if she had come to terms with the things she had to say.

“I don’t know how Circe manipulated me,” Janice said. “If she has some kind of special power, I could never sense it. When I touched her, I didn’t get anything that wasn’t already apparent. It wasn’t so much what I felt as what I didn’t. With Circe, it always seemed that a piece was missing somehow. Touching her was like seeing everything, but not seeing anything at all. I couldn’t decide if there was something she was hiding, or something she didn’t have.

“Our first lunch was like that. She invited me to her home. At the time, everything seemed so casual. Looking back, it seems the whole afternoon was calculated to put me at ease. Even though I made a lot of money on my third book, the first two had put me into debt. In the end, I barely broke even. Circe knew that. She had what I wanted—a big house, material things—and she knew it. Visiting Circe’s home, enjoying good food served on fine china…it seemed that the world she inhabited was my deepest dream realized.

“I told her that. As I said, I told her everything—all about the stress caused by my gift, and the way the book tour had drained me…all of it.

“And then it was Circe’s turn. She’d just been on the cover
Newsweek
,
and the media attention was pretty intense at the time. She talked about that. And then she told me about her family. Her father and her sister, and the things they believed and the things she didn’t. She said that they were destroying her plans for the church, draining the fortune her father had built in the sixties, and she wanted to be free of them.”

“I guess she got her wish,” I said. “And you helped her do it.”

“Yes, I did. And I would have gone on helping her. After the
Newsweek
story, the autobiography was the next big step on Circe’s promotional plan. Working on it, I spent more time at Circe’s house than my own. She set up an office for me at her place. Every day I’d talk to Circe, write about her. At night, I dreamed about her. I began to feel that, in a way, I was her.”

“Or the woman she pretended to be.”

“Yes. Her wants became my wants. Her needs were my needs. When I did something for her, I felt that I was doing it for me, too.”

“Right down to chauffeuring a hit man.”

She nodded. “It seems so obvious now. Circe knew what I wanted out of life. The funny thing is, I never knew what she wanted. Not really. She pretended to tell me everything, but even though I felt as if I were living in her skin at times, I never understood the needs behind her actions. I never had a clue. Even after ghosting her autobiography, I really didn’t know Circe Whistler at all.”

I swallowed hard. Janice’s words were hitting too close to home. Once upon a time I’d shared a meal with Circe Whistler, too. I couldn’t help remembering it, and the things we’d done in her father’s bed in the shadow of that meal.

That night Circe Whistler gave me what I wanted.

The next morning she tried to kill me.

The turn came up quick. I nearly missed it. Mud splattered against the wheel wells as I downshifted. The rear end started to drift, but the tires dug in and kept us on the road.

“I feel better,” Janice said. “Thanks for listening.”

I choked back laughter. The grove was coming up soon. I parked the Explorer at the trail head, turned off the lights, and killed the engine.

Bleak shadows waited under the redwood boughs. Fat raindrops dripped from the branches and splattered against the truck cab like hammer strikes.

Janice’s voice was a whisper. “Can I ask you a question?” Sure.

“Are you going to kill me?”

She stared at me, waiting for an answer.

After a minute, she started shaking.

I opened the door and stepped out into the storm.

“Let’s go,” I said.

6

As it turned out, the bodyguard’s coat was overrated.

I stood on the bridge, soaked to the skin. Janice was just as wet—she’d climbed out of the Explorer looking like a model for an L.L. Bean catalog, and now she looked like she belonged in a homeless shelter. Still, she seemed younger somehow—her makeup washed away, her blonde hair plastered to her skull, her delicate hands holding an oversized flashlight that made her seem childish.

Thunder boomed above—an angry bear’s growl.

“This is crazy,” Janice said.

“Maybe,” I said.

She aimed the flashlight at my face, eyeing me like I was a hungry grizzly. I
was
hungry—hungry for things she could tell me. I had a lot of questions, but now that we were here I wasn’t sure how to go about asking them.

I decided to tell Janice as little as possible. “There’s someone who spends a lot of time here,” I began. “I want you to tell me about her.”

“This is a bridge. God knows how many people have crossed it. You can’t expect me to pick up an impression of just one of them. That’s not why you brought me here, is it?”

I told her that it was.

I explained that doing what I asked was her only chance to stay alive.

And then I told her about the little girl.

Some of my words were lost in thunder, but Janice heard enough. “You’re telling me that the little girl you’re looking for is dead?”

“She’s a ghost.”

“Oh, God.”

“Like I told you before: I see ghosts.”

“I sensed your power when I touched your knife. It was nothing more than a glimpse really, but I saw enough to convince me that you were telling the truth. I would have never believed it before that. I thought you were trying to scare me with all that talk about seeing Natasha Orlovsky’s ghost. You just don’t seem like the type.”

“I’m not. When it comes to the supernatural, I’m a pretty hard sell. There’s not much I believe in, really. But I do believe what I see.”

“I wish I could see the things you’ve seen.”

She sounded as dreamy as a schoolgirl with a crush, and I had to laugh. “Don’t be so sure about that.”

“But you’ve seen behind the veil.”

“That’s one way of putting it.”

“Tell me….” She hesitated. “Tell me what you’ve seen.”

I smiled at her. There we were, standing wet and cold on a bridge in the middle of nowhere, but Janice Ravenwood didn’t mind. Not as long as she had a chance of unlocking an eternal mystery or two. She stared at me, waiting for answers with the eager eyes of an acolyte.

Janice’s flashlight beam burned my retinas.

I reached out and took the flashlight from her hands.

My face was lost in the dark.

I turned the light on Janice.

I saw her clearly, as clearly as I saw the dead.

But that didn’t mean I knew her secrets.

“Please tell me,” she persisted. “Good or bad…I really want to know what it’s like on the other side.”

Her eyes gleamed expectantly. A woman who’d lived for years off of pretty lies, waiting to hear the truth.

“Later,” I lied. “Later, I’ll tell you everything you want to know.”

* * *

I described the little girl. Her blue eyes, her blonde hair, her little
Addams Family
dress. I pointed to the spot where she sat, legs dangling over the side as she watched the creek for the splash of a steelhead’s tail fin.

Driven by the storm, the creek rushed faster now. Dark and brown as the rain bled over the earth and the river drank mud from the shore.

The rising wind howled through the forest and gave voice to the tempest that rose from the sea. Though not so loud as the thunder. The ground shook as sharp cracks slashed the steady scream of the storm.

“We’re wasting time,” I said, and Janice nodded.

She sat on the wet wood in exactly the same spot as the little girl. Inhaling deeply, she closed her eyes. A minute passed. Janice started to shiver. The rain pounded down. Droplets stained her cheeks, glistening in the flashlight’s stark illumination.

“She likes it here,” Janice said finally. “She likes watching the fish. Steelheads. They swim against the current. They fight it. They have to fight it, because they have to get upstream, they have to—”

“They have to spawn.”

“Yes. The little girl knows that, because her father told her about the steelheads in a letter. He promised that her mother would bring her to this very spot, where she could see for herself. And her mother did just that, and told her to wait for her father, and left her here all alone.

“The girl is frightened. She doesn’t want to disappoint her father. She doesn’t know him, except for his letters. She keeps them in a special place, bound with a black ribbon, and she looks at them when she feels lonely. Sometimes she reads them over and over, and sometimes she just stares at the pretty red envelopes, at the return address written in her father’s strong hand.

“She knows that address will be her new home. She hopes she’ll like her father’s house as much as she likes it here on the bridge. She doesn’t mind being alone here. She’s used to being alone. She’s a quiet girl. She doesn’t have any friends at home. Her mother won’t allow it.

“She waits for her father. She hopes he will be her friend. She stares down at the water and watches as a steelhead slices a dark ripple on the surface, almost close enough to touch. If she were only a little closer, if she reached out at just the right time….”

“I don’t care about the fish,” I said. “Tell me about the little girl. Tell me who she is.”

“It’s not that easy. I follow her thoughts like a chain—one link at a time. First her parents and the creek. Then the fish….”

“Forget the goddamn fish.”

Janice leaned forward at a dangerous angle, as if she were trying to see her reflection in the brown water. It was impossible to see anything there. With a pair of living eyes, at least. But if you were staring through the eyes of the dead—

“She sees her shadow on the water,” Janice said. “She seems so small. She doesn’t like being small. Everyone says she’s pretty, but she knows they only say that to be polite. She’s too thin, and her skin is pale as white corn, and she doesn’t like her blonde hair. She wants to be someone else. Someone different. She wants dark hair like a girl in a storybook. And she wants pretty skin, skin like no one else on earth.

“Skin like the scales of a fish, skin that shines and gleams like a brave knight’s armor. She wants that more than anything. She’s not going to look away from her shadow until she sees a steelhead swim through her rippling body. She wants to see that living mercury splash through her face and—”

“
Forget
the fish, dammit!” I grabbed Janice’s coat, afraid she was about to tumble into the creek. “I want to know about the girl!”

Janice cried out, and the sound was like a crack of thunder, as if something had snapped inside her.

I shook her. “Tell me her name!”

“It can’t be.” Janice shook her head. “It’s impossible.”

Dropping the flashlight, I pulled Janice to her feet and slapped her hard. I gave her one more chance to answer, and my tone of voice told her that I wouldn’t give her another.

“Everyone calls her CeeCee,” Janice said. “Everyone but her father. In his letters, he always calls her Circe.”

My fingers dug into Janice’s trim shoulders. “You’re hurting me,” she said, but I barely heard her.

A dozen conflicting impressions raced through my mind. The little blonde girl and raven-haired Circe…two faces becoming one, features joining around a pair of deep blue eyes.

But one couldn’t be the other. It was impossible. Their eyes might be the same, but they were so different. Not just the color of their hair—that could be changed on a whim. But the girl was dead, and the woman was alive, and there was no way to justify that they were one and the same.

“You’re going to break my arms!” Janice yelped. “Let me go!

I did, glaring at her now.

I slapped her again. “That lie wasn’t pretty,” I said. “Now tell me the truth.”

“I
am
telling the truth!”

I drew back my hand. This time she didn’t cringe from the blow. She intercepted it, grabbing my wrist so that my palm thudded against her shoulder.

Her fingernails dug in and broke skin. “Let me go, you bastard!” she shrieked. “I told you the truth!”

The rain beat down on us. I spun her around and grabbed her from behind and she tried to squirm away. The creek rushed below. My arms closed over her breasts and she scratched at my hands, screaming at the top of her lungs.

I told her to shut up if she wanted to live, but she wasn’t listening anymore. I swore in spite of myself as her nails raked my flesh and my blood coursed over her fingers, and a fresh torrent of screams poured down with the rain.

But the screams did not come from me, and they did not come from Janice Ravenwood.

They came from the thing at the far side of the bridge.

A thing too tall to be a little girl’s ghost.

I saw it, of course. Only in silhouette, but I knew that it was a dead thing. A ghost. Just an oily smear against the forest.

The way I was built, I couldn’t help but see it. But Janice saw it too. She gripped my bloody hand, and her psychic gift surged through my blood, and she saw through my eyes.

Just as she’d wished.

The thing came forward, a black streak of shadow. Janice held me tight, her thoughts scrabbling inside my skull like a hundred frenzied spiders. She wanted to scream, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t do anything but watch, and listen, and wait. All she had to do to banish the ghost was let go of my hand, but she held on tight. Out of fear, out of fascination…I don’t know what made her do it. All I knew is that she couldn’t let go.

The thing took another step, stumbling in the dark, and then another. Blacker than the night, a shadow’s shadow. A bar of light cast from the dropped flashlight lay in the thing’s path.

It avoided the light, clinging to the bridge railing.

It stopped just a few feet away from us.

The dead thing’s screams faded to whimpers. But it wasn’t the sound that raised my hackles. It was the stink of death.

I took a shallow breath, and Janice retched against a terrible perfume born of murder and blood and the rot of an early grave.

Janice struggled in my arms, trying to break contact. She didn’t want to see the world through my eyes. I could sense that. She didn’t want to draw back the veil of death. Not anymore.

“Don’t look away, Janice,” the thing said. “I want you to see where your marble road leads.”

Lethe Whistler’s ghost laughed against the storm. Janice struggled harder, wet and slippery in my arms. She kicked the fallen flashlight and it whirled madly on the bridge, white rivulets spilling everywhere, slicing the forest, spearing the night and the thing that lurked there.

The beam found its target crouching low to meet the light. A sharp blade of light speared the dead woman as surely as the one that had killed her, revealing her gristled ribs and skinned sex and a cleaved, lipless smile laughing under blue, blue eyes.

Janice broke free of my grasp and ran.

Almost immediately, she was swallowed by the night.

I snatched up the flashlight and aimed it at the dead thing. A snake of illumination slithered across Lethe’s pitiless eyes. She said, “Kill that bitch, or you’ll never see the little girl again.”

I didn’t have time to think. I drew a pistol as I spun away from the ghost. I aimed the flashlight into the forest, but its range was much too short to reveal the woman who had wished to see the world of the dead.

I couldn’t see her, but I knew that she was there all the same.

I closed my eyes against the rain and emptied my pistol into the darkness.