On screen, the Tonight Show set darkens even further, but now the camera pulls back and Michael can see that the set is not complete. It's just the desk and the chair and a bit of background, and beyond that it's a house. A massive, rambling old house with cracked windows, a place where time has moved on and no one has updated anything—curtains, wallpaper, carpet—in half a century.
What the hell is this?
Carson's still wearing the turban, but he's in his suit now. The rest of the costume is gone. He holds the next envelope up to his forehead. “And what is your next stunning revelation, oh great sage of the East?”McMahon asks in that bellowing voice.
“Susan,”Carnac/Carson/Uncle Johnny says.
His eyes shift and he's staring out at the TV audience again. But not at everyone. Just at Michael. Twelve-year-old Michael in his pajamas. Grown-up Michael, impossibly sprawled on the itchy red pullout sofa from his parents' basement.
“Her name is Susan, you jackass. She told you, don't you remember? She whispered it to you. Her little sister, Lily? Millie? No, Hilly—I knew it was something like Jilly. You did, too, didn't you? Hilly couldn't say Susan, she always said Scoosan, and that's where Scooter came from. Jesus. Wake up, moron. You promised you'd find her. Take my advice and do it. Quick. Damn skippy.”
Carson isn't smiling. He isn't mugging for the camera. He isn't smirking. Good old Uncle Johnny, Carnac the Magnificent, the King of Late Night . . . Johnny Carson is pissed off.
“Wake up, Michael. Go find her.”
Ed McMahon just laughs and laughs.
The screen goes dark.
Michael flinches. He lifts his gaze and sees Scooter—Susan—standing behind the television with the cord in her hand, plug dangling from her grasp. The TV is dead. The image is gone.
Susan.
“Susan what, though?”Michael asks. “Susan what?”
Scooter mouths a word. A name. Maybe her last name. But no sound comes from her lips and Michael can't read lips. One word, though. One syllable, even. That name.
The lost girl glances around and now it is her eyes that go wide. Scooter's eyes. Susan's eyes. Michael sees terror there on the face of that girl, the pretty little angel who is limned with golden light that is the only illumination in the darkness of that room. His living room.
But it isn't, is it? His parents' old pullout sofa was in the basement of their house. Basement. Living room. He looks around and sees that this is neither one.
The itchy red sofa and the unplugged TV are next to Johnny Carson's desk on a stolen swatch of Tonight Show set in the middle of a crumbling, creaking old house. Things shift in the dark.
Michael smells popcorn.
HE OPENED HIS EYES AND sucked in a lungful of air with a rasp, as though someone had been holding a pillow over his face while he was sleeping. Michael’s heart was hammering and his body was shaking. A chill went down his back in spite of the trickle of sweat that raced it from skull to tailbone.
“Oh, Jesus,” he whispered, rocking himself over and over on the sofa in his living room. His living room. His and Jilly's. Not the itchy sofa at all, but a soft, plush, blue thing they had gotten at Jordan's Furniture in Nashua. On the TV, a pair of cute, scrappy British women instructed a third how to dress, and it all came back to him. It was Wednesday night. Five days since those gray, misshappen things had fallen upon Jillian in the dark, had touched Michael. Three days since the two of them had even spoken to one another. Michael was afraid to try, afraid to look into her eyes and see nothing of the kindness that had always resided there.
His appointment with the psychiatrist, Dr. Lee, had been scheduled for today, but he'd blown it off. After what had happened five nights ago, he was certain no doctor—for mind or body—was going to be able to help him.
No. It was up to Michael to figure out what to do next. If he could just get up off the sofa.
This afternoon he had switched on BBC America and promptly fallen asleep.
It was dark in the living room, save for the strange blue light from the television. How odd, he'd always thought, that the color of the light didn't seem to change with the colors on the screen. Outside the windows there was only the night and the darkness.
Michael frowned as he glanced at the digital readout on the cable box. It was nearly a quarter to ten. Late. Not one light had been turned on in the house. He groaned as he pushed himself to his feet, stretching, bones popping. Questions swirled in his mind as he crossed the room and hit the switch, throwing the light from half a dozen recessed bulbs into the living room. The night had been visible outside the windows before, but with the glare within they were just black now. It might have been a coal mine outside, or the inside of an oil well, or the end of the world.
He felt better with the lights on. Instantly he was more awake. Scattered fragments of his dream went cascading down into the well of his consciousness; in his mind he snatched at them, not wanting to let them go. Most of it went away despite his efforts. There had been something about Johnny Carson.
And there had been the girl in the shadowy corner behind the television. Now the shadows were gone, the room drenched in light, but he was reluctant to look over there in any case. She might still be there, a wisp, a shimmer of color. A ghost.
Scooter.
“No,” Michael corrected himself, his voice a tired rasp. “Susan.”
Even with the British women chattering on BBC America, the sound of his own voice was startling. It echoed strangely in the house and though he had no proof of it, he felt inside a strange confirmation of what he had suspected from the moment he awoke.
Jillian had not come home.
There was no alarm in him. Until the events of Friday night he would have panicked, thinking that some terrible fate had befallen her. Was she dead in a ditch on the side of the road? Had she been in a car accident? But now . . . now he only felt a bone-deep dread that resonated inside of him.
“Jilly?” he called into the empty house, receiving only an echo in reply. It was a lonesome certainty, the knowing she was not there. And yet he felt that he had to go through the motions, had to confirm it, because you simply could not go through life functioning on instinct.
He went up the stairs and checked their bedroom, turning on lights as he went. The spare room was also empty. The home office. But there was no one there. No one home but Michael and the shadows. Michael started back down the stairs, but stopped halfway and sat heavily, hanging his head.
Find the girl. Like you promised you would, he thought.
It all came down to that. It was all connected.
Michael was a pragmatic man, or had been until recently. It was one thing to attribute that Saturday night's events to hallucinogenics, but the situation had gone way beyond that. Ghost or not, the little girl was haunting him. She needed his help. Whoever these gray, twisted women were, they did not want him to get involved.
They want to frighten you away, to drive you off. You've got them worried. Which means that you can help, Michael. Or they wouldn't have bothered with you.
He had tried to find her and come up empty. That had likely been what prompted them to come after him and Jilly. But they didn't understand people. Didn't understand love and marriage for sure. If they had, they would have understood that by doing whatever they had done to Jillian, they had taken away the one thing in his life that he would sacrifice anything for.
Michael Dansky had nothing left to lose.
There had been enough lying around on the sofa. He had been shell-shocked by what happened. But his dream was lingering. He did not know if it was something unnatural, some way in which the ghost of the girl had touched his sleeping mind, or if it was simply his unconscious telling him, but he knew it was all tied together. His wife had not been mugged or raped. There were no police for whatever had happened to her, no detectives, no one out to get justice for that violation.
It's up to me, he thought.
Michael rose from the stairs and continued do
wn. He would wait for Jillian, all night if he had to. But while he waited, he would set out the map he had been using when searching for the old house where he had brought Scooter—Susan—and see if there were any small side streets he might have missed. There had to be something. It was there. He had been inside. The house was real. He wasn't sure how he could have missed the street, but—
They don't want you to find it.
No, of course they don't.
Now he nodded. Those ugly women in their shapeless coats weren't normal. He had no idea what they were capable of. It was possible they had misled him while he was searching, thrown him off the trail. He would be more thorough tomorrow. Very thorough. No matter what the cost. He was frightened of them. The feeling of fingers inside his throat, of his voice being used by someone else, of this thing just taking him over, still left him feeling unclean. But what other choice did he have?
His stomach rumbled. He hadn't eaten anything all day.
Again he glanced at the clock. Where are you, Jilly?
The smell of popcorn lingered in his nostrils—or, rather, in his mind, leftover from his dream. Michael went into the kitchen and began opening and closing cabinets and the refrigerator. He wasn't up to making himself a meal, but he was hungry. When he came across the box of microwave popcorn a wave of nostalgia swept through him. That wasn't what he had been smelling. His bizarre olfactory “hallucinations” were very specific. It was old-fashioned, homemade popcorn he had been smelling. But what the hell, he thought. Why not?
Michael put a bag of popcorn into the microwave and hit the timer. It hummed to life, the numbers on the timer ticking silently down toward zero. For a few moments the microwave seemed to be doing nothing, but then there came a single pop, followed by a burst of several at once, and then a steady, staccato sound, like tiny fireworks in a drum.
Ding!
Even after the bell, several last kernels popped. Michael's stomach growled loudly. He opened the microwave door and reached for the puffy, overstuffed bag.
His hand froze inches away from it. The heat from the popcorn steamed against his fingers.
There were greasy stains soaking into the bag from the inside. But these were not random streaks. They formed a pattern.
Letters. A name.
Barnes.
Even as he stared, the greasy streaks ran and the name was obscured. But it had been there. Michael was certain of that.
A tremor in his hand, he reached out and slammed the microwave closed. In the glass door he saw his reflection . . . and the reflection of the little lost girl, the blond angel who stood behind him in the kitchen.
Michael cried out and spun around, stomach lurching, heart pounding against the inside of his chest as though it might tear free. But the girl was not there. He was still alone in the house.
Slowly he faced the microwave again. He opened the door. The bag of popcorn was just that, now. The oily streaks were barely noticeable. But the name was seared into his head. The lost girl had been doing everything she could to try to communicate with him, but something didn't want her to. She was bound, somehow, and couldn't really reach him. In some way he knew that. But she managed, still. She managed.
Barnes.
Susan Barnes.
JILLIAN PULLED INTO THE DRIVEWAY a little before one A.M. and did not bother to try to get the car into the garage. She was not so drunk that she didn’t realize she would likely scrape one side or the other going in. There was a kind of delicious feeling burning low in her abdomen. Her lips seemed very dry and she licked them over and over. At some point she had taken off her shoes to make it more comfortable to drive, and they were on the seat next to her. Jilly left them there as she got out of the car and slammed the door.
Her suede jacket was not warm enough for the chill of a November witching hour, and even with the alcohol in her she shivered as she hurried to the door. The cold pavement of the walkway stung her bare feet and swirled around her legs, flapping her skirt. Jillian purred softly to herself with the thrill of that cold wind caressing her.
It took her a moment to realize that her keys were clutched in her hand and she snarled at them as though they had conspired against her. Teeth chattering, she scraped the key against the door several times before finally sliding it home and twisting it.
When she closed the door, her keys were still hanging from the lock. She noticed for a moment, and then just as quickly forgot. The warm buzz in the most primal part of her brain had not blocked out the most vital bit of information. She had to work in the morning. Time for bed.
She went up the stairs with her jacket still on, holding the rail to steady herself. Her palm made a shushing noise on the wood that she liked.
A dull drone of voices came from the bedroom. Jillian paused at the top of the stairs and frowned deeply. Her nostrils flared. Fuck, she thought. Fucking Michael. The light from the television flickered from that open door. After a second or two she rolled her eyes and continued on.
When she stepped through the door she found Michael still awake. He sat propped against his pillows, watching something black and white. A tall man was arguing with a short, stumpy guy and a blond-haired woman with a masculine voice and the body of a prison matron. Michael had a plastic tub of popcorn on his stomach. There were bits of it spilled onto the bed. On the sheets. Some on the floor. Two empty microwave bags were on the nightstand beside him.
Michael's gaze shifted to her, then back to the television.
“What the hell are you up to?” Jillian asked, swaying a bit as she walked into the room.
“What does it look like?” Michael replied.
She flinched. Unbelievable. He was lazing around having himself a grand old popcorn fiesta and she was working to pay the goddamn mortgage. Beautiful.
“Did you finish your sketches for that client?” she asked.
Michael resolutely refused to look at her. This was the last thing in the world Jillian was going to put up with. Who the hell did he think he was? She shifted position, blocking his view of the TV. For several seconds he continued to stare straight ahead, as though he could see through her. Then, with hateful slowness, he at last met her gaze.
“Go to bed,” he told her.
“Fuck you. You don't talk to me like that,” she snapped, hand on one hip. “What the hell have you been doing around here all day and all night?”
His breathing quickened and his eyes grew moist. He bit his lip. “Me? What have I been doing? It's one in the morning, Jilly. What have you been doing? Besides drinking. I can smell that much from here.”
She saw his gaze dart to her legs, and he winced as though the sight of her bare flesh hurt him. Her husband was a good-looking man. Darkly handsome with plenty of what she called Grrrrr. He hadn't shaved in days, but that usually only added to his appeal.
Not tonight.
Jillian smiled and withdrew her pantyhose from the right-hand pocket of her suede coat. Michael seemed to crumble a little, right before her eyes.
“I got a run in them,” she explained.
A glint of hope lit his gaze.
Then she pulled her lavender lace thong from her left-hand pocket. “This, though . . . this I took off just for fun.”
Michael stared at her. In the flickering television light she could see his Adam's apple bob as he swallowed several times in quick succession. He gritted his teeth and nodded slowly, as though making his mind up about something. And the truth was, something had changed in his eyes then. Jillian saw it. She just had no idea what it was.
“What did they do to you, Jilly? Can you tell me that? Do you even know?”
A slow grin crept across her face. She felt it, uncontrollable. “How much detail do you want?”
Confusion was etched in his features, and then dawning surprise and revulsion. Michael seemed speechless. Jillian liked that. She gestured at the TV, where the black-and-white sitcom played on. “What is this shit, anyway? Why the hell are you watching this?”
&nb
sp; Michael froze. His face went slack and his eyes widened. He looked at her as though he had never seen her before in his life. Jillian did not like that look. Something about it got under her skin, and not in a way that pissed her off—like everything seemed to—but in a way that made her a little afraid.
“What are you talking about?”
He got out of bed, spilling the bowl of popcorn all over the floor, and barely seemed to notice it as he took a step toward her. It crunched under his foot. His eyes were wild. In his underwear and a Donald Duck T-shirt, he looked like a lunatic.
“This . . . this show,” she said, uncertain now, taken off guard by his reaction. The revelation of the thong wadded up in her pocket ought to have gotten a very different response.
He drew in a long, shuddering breath and stood up straighter. “It's The Dick Van Dyke Show, Jilly. How can you not know that? I know you haven't seen it since you were a kid, but you've told me a dozen times you used to watch it with your father when you were little.”
A ripple of something unpleasant went through her. “I've never seen it before. And it's black and white, Michael. Do you think I'm stupid? This show is too old for me to have watched it as a kid.”
“Reruns, Jillian,” he said, narrowing his eyes, his head twisting slightly to one side as he studied her. “How can you not remember that?”
Twitching, she stuffed her thong and hose back into her pockets and doffed her jacket, throwing it over the edge of the bed. The question bothered her and she did not want to talk about it, did not want to deal with Michael anymore at all.
“Hold on,” he whispered.
She spun on him. “What? Hold on to what? Stop looking at me like that!”
All traces of the pitiful Michael were gone. Grim and determined, he reached for her face. Jillian flinched as he caressed her cheek and though she wanted to slap him, to claw at his eyes, she held back.
“Have you forgotten other things?”
Wildwood Road Page 16
