Peaceable Kingdom

by Jack Ketchum

  I’d hand the winner a pair of scissors so he could snip off her panties—that always got a rise from the crowd—and then the guy would start painting. When we figured he’d been at it long enough we’d black-light the place and bring up the music, and when Mary started dancing again it was wild. The paint was irridescent and the dark was how we got around the laws about booze and dancing and total nudity. It brought the house down every night. The paint was water base so half an hour later she’d be washed off and back again, an encore for a star.

  Oh, we were rolling. Friday and Saturday nights we’d turn them away. Before it was a bar the Parrot was a bookshop, used and antique books, and before that an artist’s studio. So we only had space for about a hundred-fifty. But a hundred-fifty people all drinking all night is some pretty tidy cash, believe me. We were doing fine.

  Then one night we were closing and I saw Bernie feeding Mary double scotches at the bar while the waitresses stacked the chairs. Mary didn’t drink much normally so I wondered what was up. I walked over and ordered one myself. I could smell that perfume she always wore, Possession it was called, wafting through me like a subtle hunger.

  After a while she said, “it’s weird, Stu. Tonight during the show? I felt watched.”

  Well, you had to laugh.

  The way she looked stopped us though.

  “Hey you two, I’m serious. I don’t mean the way the guys normally look at you. Shit, I’m used to that. This was. . . . this was something else.”

  I felt myself freeze inside for a moment. “You mean we got some creep out there? Like that?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Whatever it was, I don’t need it.”

  I watched her gulp the scotch.

  There wasn’t much to say after that. I promised her I’d keep an eye on the crowd for her, see if I could spot anybody strange out there, and if I did I’d bounce him. I’d see this kind of thing before. Usually these guys are harmless, but you never knew. My promise seemed to help. She finished her double and went home and I just sat a while, aware of the lingering smell of Possession and thanking my lucky stars that I had Bernie there with me to remind me that I was much too old to try to comfort her further.

  And the next few nights I did look, but there was nothing. Though Mary was saying it was happening every night to her now. She would get this feeling. I began to wonder about her. You could see she was troubled. You could see it in her eyes when she performed. They weren’t the same—you didn’t see the boldness there. She could still hold a crowd absolutely breathless but she wasn’t doing it with her eyes anymore, she was doing it with her will and with her body, and you missed something.

  Then I started noticing things.

  Little things at first. There was a light in the girls’ dressing room that didn’t seem to want to go off. I’d turn it off at closing and come in next morning and it would be on again.

  Now and then on alternate Friday and Saturday nights we’d bring in a live band, local boys, and they were always complaining that somebody was moving their instruments around in the storage room. Now, nobody had a key to that room except Bernie and I, and we sure as hell weren’t doing it. We lost that band in a couple of months. I couldn’t blame them. Those instruments were costly and all they ever got out of me by way of explanation was a puzzled shrug.

  Then the chef started complaining about dishes rattling in the kitchen.

  When Bernie and I would open up the place we’d find that somebody had moved the tables and chairs around.

  We went through all the possibilities and then some. The dressing-room light was faulty wiring. Kids breaking into the storage room were messing with the instruments and moving the chairs and tables at night. The foundation was settling, rattling the dishes. Of course nothing fit with anything else. It was bullshit and we knew it.

  We had ghosts. The Parrot was haunted.

  I was already half convinced of that when somebody who wasn’t there started saying things to Paula.

  Paula was one of our dancers, a perky little blonde with a sensational bottom and a gap between her two front teeth like Lauren Hutton’s. She was sort of shy, an English lit major if I remember correctly, and the only girl in the club who insisted on wearing pasties. I used to fight with her about the pasties—it was 1996 after all—but the few times I got her to try it without them she couldn’t dance worth a damn, so finally I let her keep them. Strange what will give somebody confidence. With the pasties on she was the second best dancer we had. Not in Mary’s class but good.

  She came off stage one night and trotted over to me and said, “what is this? You teaching Sam ventriloquism or something?”

  She was angry, but sort of pale-looking too, as though she’d eaten something that didn’t quite agree. I asked her what she was talking about and she said that while she was up there somebody had been speaking to her all the while. And it was like he was standing right there with her or how else could she hear him over the music? So she thought maybe Sam had gotten into the rafters above her, into the lighting.

  Sam, of course, was on his perch where he always was. He never flew around. Sam was lazy as hell. I told her that.

  “Well, then you’re damn well haunted, Stu,” she said. “And I’d like to know exactly what you’re going to do about it.”

  I asked her what it was she’d heard.

  “The guy was giving me compliments.”

  “Compliments?”

  “Yeah. Likes my breasts. Likes my thighs. He particularly likes my ‘derriere’.”

  “He called it that? Your derriere?”

  “Yes.”

  “Jesus.”

  “What I want to know is what you intend to do about it.”

  I thought about it for a while. Hell, there was only one thing I could think of doing. “Hold a seance, I guess.”

  It seemed logical, really. Find out what the guy was up to, what he wanted. See if I could get him to disappear—over to the Seahorse a few blocks away would be nice. No trouble finding a medium. Lauderdale was crawling with them. In every tourist town you get your share of psychics, faith-healers, mediums, whatever. I just needed somebody who knew the appropriate words.

  As it turned out Mary knew the words.

  “Sure, Stu,” she said. “I used to listen to my Aunt Lilian back in Indiana. She was forever trying to summon her brother, Uncle Joe, ‘who died of drink’ as they say back there. And she’d summon him all right, but I guess he was still boozing on the other side because everything he said came out garbled. But I remember the whole routine.”

  “Want to try?”

  “Sure. Why not? Sooner the better. He talks to her, he watches me. Let’s get the bastard. Tomorrow night, after closing.”

  She scribbled out a shopping list for me. In the morning I went out and purchased everything, white tablecloth, white candles, ceramic candleholders, and a Ouija board. At dinnertime the chef told me that somebody had stuffed one of his chickens with mocha ice cream and wild rice. It wasn’t an easy thing, getting him to relax.

  That night unseen fingers plucked ever-so-lightly at Paula’s pasties.

  Things were getting out of hand.

  By three o’clock our last customer was gone and we assembled on the stage. I’d set up a table and four chairs, covered the table with the white tablecloth, put the candles in their holders and opened up the Ouija board. Mary and Paula changed into street clothes and then the three of us waited for Bernie to finish cashing out the register. Then we all sat down and I turned off the lights and lit the candles. We closed our eyes and held hands.

  I don’t remember all of what Mary said that night but it was something about how here we were, four friends, ready to invoke whatever spirit lingered here, how we came in peace and friendship and hoped he’d communicate with us either directly or through the board. She was very polite.

  I remember her hand in mine was warm and soft while Bernie’s was cooler, rougher, yet somehow far more comforting. I remember smelling Pos
session again, a heady incense. For a while there was just dark and silence. We waited.

  “Open your eyes,” she said. “We’ll try the board. Place your fingertips on the planchette very lightly.”

  If you’ve never used a board a planchette is a clear plastic triangular kind of affair with a pin set into it and it’s supposed to move around to the letters on the board, the pin spelling out the message. Bernie, Paula and I did as she said and the planchette was a dead slab of nothing. Then Mary put her fingers to it. And the damn thing went careening around the board so fast we could barely keep up with the spelling.

  “You’re pushing it!” Paula said but I could tell she wasn’t. All of us could. There was a sudden sensation in the room that was electric and practically exausting. Mary didn’t even bother to deny it. She was too busy watching the swooping, whirling plastic.

  About five minutes later we had our message. Bernie wrote it down. I have it in a drawer to this day.

  HELLO MY NAME IS FRANK W AND YOU OFFEND ME I DO NOT LIKE OR APPRECIATE RATHER YOUR LIQUOR AND YOUR NAKED DEGRADED WOMEN OR YOUR NOISY DRUNKEN CROWDS AND ESPECIALLY THE PAINTING ESPECIALLY THAT IT IS STUPID IT IS DISGRACEFUL AND I HAVE CERTAIN SENSIBILITIES WILL YOU PLEASE DESIST AT ONCE INCIDENTALLY WHAT IS THAT REVOLTING MUSIC

  “Rock’n roll,” said Mary.

  OH said the board. And then for a while we got nothing. We asked questions, who he was and why he was here, and got only stubborn silent inactivity for our trouble until finally he said THIS IS MY HOME I HAVE ALWAYS LIVED HERE IVE BEEN HERE FOREVER THE LIGHT IS GOOD AND BY THE WAY WHAT IS THAT PERFUME YOURE WEARING

  “Possession,” said Mary.

  OH said the board. ITS VERY NICE

  “One of us naked degraded woman he likes, anyway,” said Paula.

  And that was that.

  We sat over drinks and stewed. Bernie kept setting them up for us. Mary would toss Sam a peanut now and then. We talked well into morning and by the time we were through, Sam, who is pretty good with short-term memory, was re-asking all the questions for us. “What are we supposed to do? How are we gonna get rid of the sonovabitch? Who is this guy? Anybody got any ideas?”

  “Shut up, Sam,” said Bernie.

  Suddenly I got it. “The hall of records!” I said.

  “Sure,” said Mary. “We can find out who he is, anyway.”

  I didn’t get much sleep. By noon Bernie and I were over at the hall of records and it took us till 2:30 to find him. We started too far back, taking him at his word the he’d lived there a long time. But he hadn’t. He was the artist, Frank W. Morgan. He’d owned the place for fifteen years just prior to its conversion into a bookshop back in the 1920s. I should have figured it from what he said—THE LIGHT IS GOOD HERE. A painter. Of course.

  We went from there to the library and looked up reprints of his stuff. I couldn’t see why he objected to the body painting. Half his work consisted of nudes. He painted them in mythical, quasi-metaphysical settings, sort of similar to the pre-Raphaelites, that kind of thing, with titles like Dido and Anaeus, The Lamia, Circe, and Penelope at the Spinning Wheel. All a bit melodramatic for my tastes, a bit precious, but not half bad either. What we had here was the ghost of a pretty eminent man. He had died of heart failure in 1928, a bachelor, at age thirty-seven.

  We told Paula and Mary what we had and they couldn’t wait to get back to the Ouija board.

  The body painting stayed, of course. It was not the business of some cranky ghost to tell me how to make a living. Besides, it was easier on all of us now. Knowing who he was made him much less disturbing. Mary’s performance that night was halfway back to normal.

  After closing we got him talking again.

  We told him what we knew about him. OH REALLY he said. We asked him where in the place he’d died. We were curious. NONE OF YOUR DAMN BUSINESS he said. We asked him if he liked the girls. We got no answer to that one. We asked him why he painted mythical instead of modern scenes and he said THE TWENTIES WERE TOO GAUDY FOR ME AND I FORGOT TO ASK WHAT ARE THOSE RIDICULOUS THINGS YOU WEAR ON YOUR NIPPLES. Paula blushed and told him they were pasties. Finally Mary got what later amounted to an inspiration and asked him if he’d always come when we called him like this. YES he said.

  She asked him why.

  BECAUSE I DAMN WELL HAVE TO he said and suddenly the table began to shake like we had our own private earthquake in the place. You could feel his rage pouring up through the floorboards. Bernie went white as a sheet. It was scary.

  And just before it stopped I heard Sam squawking behind me from his perch, his voice high-pitched and shrill. I had never heard Sam scared of anything before and I almost stopped it all right then and there—and of course I know now I should have. But Mary had planted something in my mind. I’m an entrepreneur. I can’t help it. It comes with years of practice and gets in the blood and stays there.

  He said he had to come when we called him. And he shook tables.

  The following night he pulled the tablecloth out from under the candlesticks. It shot maybe three feet into the air and then came drifting down behind me. The night after that he floated the table two feet off the floor. On the third night he mashed the planchette on the Ouija board into a flat clear plastic plate.

  And the point is, we asked him to do these things.

  Mary did, actually. He always seemed to respond to Mary while with the rest of us it was iffy. But I figured I could use that too.

  “Suppose we do a seance,” I said to her, “before the end of the show?”

  “Huh?”

  “We fit him into it.”

  “You’re crazy, Stu.”

  “Why not? We try it once. If nothing happens, no big loss. If it works, we’ll advertise the hell out of him.”

  We were sitting at the bar and the dinner crowd was slowly arriving. Whatever the cook was doing in the kitchen he was doing right, and it was making me hungry. Mary’s scent was working on me in a different way. At the moment I felt lean and smart and avaricious. I smiled at her and she looked at me for a while and then smiled back. And there was that look in her eyes again, that sense of hey, what the hell.

  “I don’t know, Stu,” she said. But she was being coy now. “Suppose you just tell me what you’ve got in mind.”

  We set it up.

  We gave him the spot right after Paula’s, right before the body-painting number. That way if he flopped we’d still have our topper. We dimmed the lights and had a couple of the waitresses carry on the table with the cloth and candles, the Ouija board and the mashed planchette, and meantime I went into a little act of my own, trying to spook the crowd.

  I told them all about Frank W. Morgan, all this stuff about him being a painter and dead since 1928 and you should have heard them hoot and holler. They thought we were pulling one, naturally. But I got to them eventually. I made up this story about how he’d been murdered by a former lover, a jealous model. I made it all grim and gothic and by the end of it I had them interested. The place was quiet for once. So quiet that when somebody dropped a soup ladle in the kitchen you could feel half of them jump.

  Bernie and Paula and Mary came on dressed in white robes and took their places at the table and I did likewise, lighting the candles while the dimmers faded to black.

  And I could feel him there. Even before we called him. Something cold and tough right beside me. And I had the horrible feeling he was smirking.

  We got our response from the crowd right off, all the ooohs and ahhhs, just as soon as the table started to rise, and then again when the candles switched places and when the tablecloth started flapping, and again when the Ouija board just folded up and flew across the room, slamming against the bar. That shut them up entirely. I think they were truly scared by then, scared mostly for Mary, who was doing all the talking, but maybe for themselves too because the feeling in the room had grown so thick and strange and Sam’s cawing was so unearthly, starting off like a low groan and going louder and shriller until finally—according to pl
an, mind you—Mary stood up and told the ghost of Frank W. Morgan to take her robe off and to do it now and he did, and of course she was naked underneath. And by then it was a screeching sound Sam was making, a high shrill bird-sound of stark terror.

  “Paint me,” she said.

  I had no idea it was coming. I honestly didn’t.

  We all knew how he felt about the body painting, and I’d have told her not to if she’d given me any warning. Some people don’t believe me but it’s the truth. But it was just like her to pull out the stops like that, to make it all theatrical and exciting. It was that boldness again, that daring. The paint cans and brushes were right behind her, in the wings, stage right, waiting, and she knew it.