The Spirit Cabinet

by Paul Quarrington

  But the situation is this. Das Haus has been invaded. There are tiny creatures everywhere, little gnomes and poltergeists. And there is a larger being creeping about, black-clad and faceless, Samson’s silent tormentor.

  Samson ducks behind a couch when two little people enter the room, tiny versions of Jurgen and Rudolfo. They are looting and pillaging, their anger whetted by the fact that the kitchen yielded no food other than spoiled raw meat. They kick at the little animals in their path, starving creatures who no longer have the strength to scuttle out of the way. The little Jurgen and Rudolfo see the huge television set, which slows down their rampage momentarily. Ironically, there is a nature show being broadcast, a documentary on leopards. The little Jurgen and Rudolfo watch one of Samson’s cousins, a brightly spotted male with huge testicles, run down a gazelle. They watch the cat bury its face in the gazelle’s neck, they watch the geyser of blood, then the little Jurgen picks up a lamp and tosses it through the screen.

  The light explodes.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  “Barry Reno,” said Curtis Sweetchurch, “can go fuck himself.”

  He slipped a hand over the mouthpiece of his cell phone and looked over at Bren. The two men threw their shoulders up and down in silent mirth. Whoever Curtis was talking to remonstrated at quite a pitch, forcing him to peel the telephone away from the side of his head. “I know, I know, last time you were doing me a favour. I know that, snookums. But I have my clients’ best interests at heart.”

  Rudolfo walked into the Gymnasium at this moment, stripped down to his workout briefs. He was startled, even horrified, to find the two men in there. Curtis was straddling the stationary bike, although he was not pedalling. Bren was doing wrist curls, his hands clutching enormous dumbbells.

  Curtis turned around—the bike was faced away from the doorway so as to reduce distraction—and saw his client. “Rudy, baby,” he said, folding up the telephone and hiding it deep within the pockets of the enormous shorts he was wearing. “Where’s Jurgen?”

  It was not lost on Rudolfo that all anybody seemed to ask him these days was, “Where’s Jurgen?” As if he knew. He knew the options, he alone held the list of possibilities, but he rarely had any idea where Jurgen was. Every night, he knew, Jurgen showed up to do the Show. He didn’t always drive in with Rudolfo. Sometimes he did; sometimes as Rudolfo was climbing glumly into the back of the limousine, Jurgen would appear suddenly, his eyes blazing, his robe tattered and dull. He would address der Schwarze in a strange language, his mouth opening with exaggerated volume and modulation, his tongue making clicking sounds against the roof of his mouth. The chauffeur would bow deeply, as though in the presence of royalty. But other nights, Rudolfo would close the door to the car and tap the glass separating the cab. He would sit alone and silent during the drive through the desert. Jurgen would be at the Abraxas, waiting.

  Where could Jurgen be? Well, he could be in the Grotto, reading the books, although he seemed to be spending less and less time there. Rudolfo got the impression—formulated through rare sightings and an informal surveillance of the rock that blocked the Grotto—that Jurgen was no longer spending hours and hours locked away in that shadowy cave. Instead, he seemed to be dashing in and out. But where did he go when he left the Grotto? Rudolfo had no idea.

  “Reno wants you guys back,” said Curtis. Rudolfo’s presence unnerved and unsettled him. For one thing, he failed to respond to questions—where was Jurgen?—and simply stood there brooding, his lips pursed, his brow moulded with thought. For another thing, what was with that underwear?

  The other place that Jurgen could be, Rudolfo was thinking, was actually inside the Davenport Spirit Cabinet. Rudolfo hoped not, because this possibility terrified him the most. He hated it when he came upon the hideous wardrobe with its door closed; light struggled from its cracks and openings, light so weak that it only made it a foot or two before being swallowed by darkness. Animals crawled and flew from the cookie-cutout holes, not furry or feathered animals but scaly creatures that even Rudolfo, avid amateur naturalist, could not identify. Rudolfo hated it when Jurgen was shut in the Spirit Cabinet, but he hated it even more when the doors flew apart and Jurgen emerged, ghostly white and glowing.

  Bren spoke up. “We told Reno to get stuffed.” He possessed a very low voice. Rudolfo turned toward Bren and blinked several times, but he was still not moved to speech.

  “You know what?” demanded Curtis, who hated silence in general, and weird silences in particular. “You guys are too big for Reno. You guys are too big for television. I’m not talking to anybody who is not from a major studio, because my vision now is one of motion pictures.”

  “I’ve written a treatment,” announced Bren. “I haven’t shown it to anybody, but already there’s a lot of interest.”

  “There’s very strong buzz,” concurred Sweetchurch, staring at the sullen Rudolfo, “and no one even knows about the project.”

  “It’s an adventure slash comedy slash drama slash motivational type thing,” said Bren. When he said slash he smote the air brutally with the dumbbells.

  “Is funny,” said Rudolfo suddenly. Curtis almost fell off the bike. “Because Houdini, you know, he sell fucking books because he lose money in movies.” Or, at least, that was the story. It was possible, it suddenly occurred to him, that the lost revenue had nothing to do with it. That may be just a cover-up story, ja, it was possible, likely even, that there was otherworldly contagion, a virus attached to the books, or contained within the mouldy apparatus—cultured within the smelly Davenport Spirit Cabinet itself—and Houdini sold the Collection so as to get rid of the disease.

  And why did Eddie McGehee decide so suddenly to auction off the Collection?

  Because, Rudolfo saw now, he had discovered the sickness.

  “Curtis Sweetchurch,” Rudolfo commanded, lofting a finger and stabbing it toward his manager. “You will find for me Eddie McGehee.”

  “Oh, sugar,” whimpered Curtis, “I’m a busy beaver. I’ve got no time—”

  “Do as I say.”

  “Now, now, Rudolfo—” Bren started, curling the weights significantly, popping veins the length of his forearm.

  “Find me Eddie McGehee. Get me his address. I must go have speaks with him. Now get out. I am making exercise in the Gymnasium.”

  Cowed by Rudolfo’s sudden reclamation of his previous hauteur, Curtis slipped off the stationary bike and slunk toward the door. Bren lingered, his knuckles tightening around the steel grips of the weights he was holding. Sweetchurch jerked his head at his assistant, and Bren allowed the dumbbells to drop to the ground with a resounding thud.

  Then Rudolfo was alone.

  Dizzy with energy, he yanked off his cap and wig, climbed aboard the stationary bike and pedalled furiously nowhere.

  He sensed, but didn’t see, Jurgen enter. There was a mirror on the wall some twenty feet in front of him, but it started halfway up to accommodate the racks of dumbbells and bars, the squat trees of clamps and plates. If Rudolfo had lifted his head he might have seen his partner, but he chose not to. He wanted to avoid the deathly pallor and the pale eyes, so he pretended to be in the final stages of the Tour de France. He hunkered down over the bars, leaning heavily on his forearms with his rear end elevated behind him. He considered saying something—demanding to know what was in the books, demanding to know why it was so important, demanding to know what was wrong—but instead he chose a heavy, panting silence and concentrated on the pistonlike motion of his legs, the rhythmic displacement of his two-cylinder butt.

  He was startled to feel, suddenly, Jurgen’s hand on the small of his back, the fingertips slipping just underneath the elastic of his tiny trunks. The hand dove in, cupping first one pumping buttock, then the other, over and over again, as if maddened by choice. Rudolfo’s penis sprouted, pushing easily out the front. Fingertips brushed the base of his scrotum, and Rudolfo shivered and the motion of his cycling was for an instant all confused, then he found the rhy
thm, and settled into it, and matched his breathing to it. He folded his arms across the handlebars and laid his head upon them. The fingers slowly climbed his shaft, and then they encircled the head, and as Rudolfo came he threw himself bolt upright and saw flashes of light, so intense he was nearly blinded. And that is why, many minutes later, he mistrusted, and discounted, his impression that he had been the only man reflected in the mirror.

  It was to Searchlight—a tiny town clinging to the edge of the Mojave Desert—that Edgar Biggs McGehee (Eddie’s grandfather) first repaired with the Collection, after making his bargain with Harry Houdini. Edgar lived in a small hut, not much bigger and certainly no better constructed than the Spirit Cabinet. Eddie, out of homage to his forefather, left this structure standing, although he himself lived in a huge mansion a hundred yards away.

  And it was to Searchlight—a tiny mote on the Nevada road map—that Rudolfo came.

  He was driven by Bob, that being the name of the mysterious dark chauffeur. At least “Bob” was what Rudolfo called him, although the driver himself, stabbing a thumb into the middle of his chest, produced a sound that was bracketed on each end by plosion and plosive, the middle a long, drawn-out sheep’s yodel.

  Bob had driven to Searchlight with unerring steadiness. Indeed, he was turning out to be quite the best chauffeur Rudolfo had ever employed. He was respectfully silent, communicating mostly with humble nods and half-bows. He understood his employer and his desires. So, for instance, when Rudolfo handed Bob a piece of paper with the word “Searchlight” scrawled upon it (in Curtis Sweetchurch’s loopy and hasty handwriting), the driver merely stared at it for a long moment and then nodded. His one fault was an unnecessary musicality. He whistled much of the time, a fluttering sound that rode high in the air. Sometimes he added percussion, slapping at his own body with his ink-black, creamy-palmed hands. And occasionally he would alarm his passenger by pumping at the gas and brakes in funky rhythm.

  Bob stopped the limo at the end of a long driveway. He leapt out, threw open the rear door and stepped back in order to allow Rudolfo grand and ceremonial egress from the car. Rudolfo stepped out and immediately wilted. “Fuck …” he moaned. “Is hot like hell.”

  “Hot,” agreed Bob. Or at least, he echoed it, grinning widely, as if he found the very voicing of the word amusing.

  Rudolfo began to perspire, the heat sucking moisture out of his body. Because he lacked hair, the sweat ran freely from underneath his wig and baseball cap and flooded his eyes, blinding him. He held out his hand and Bob lifted his elbow and offered to guide. Rudolfo held the black man’s arm and they began a halting march toward the mansion.

  “Is like one hundred and twenty fucking degrees,” muttered Rudolfo. It was the middle of August, the dog days, so-called because some people feel that in August the planet is influenced, even governed, by the dog star, Sirius. Sirius is worshipped by the Dogon tribe of Mali. (Bob is of Dogon ancestry.)

  The doorbell was answered by a dark woman in a crisp white uniform. She pulled the door open and waved them in. The woman and Bob exchanged whispered words and then they disappeared, leaving Rudolfo standing alone in the marbled foyer.

  “Hello!” A man, presumably Eddie McGehee, rounded the corner into the foyer. He was a very tall man, slender to the point of emaciation. He wore a fluffy bathrobe; the sleeves were too short, and where the pale arms emerged was plywood flatness knobbed with wristbone and knuckle. Below the robe were long lengths of twiggy leg, the knees ballooning like boles.

  “You are Rudolfo,” he pointed out. McGehee wore a golden fez and oversized wraparound sunglasses, mirrored so as to reflect Rudolfo’s image back into his own eyes. His face was decorated with daubs of sunscreen, but it was an obvious case of too little, too late. The tip of his nose, the rims of his ears, his brow and cheeks, were as burned and flaky as discarded snakeskin. Where it wasn’t crisp and lobster-pink, the skin had the shade and texture of copy paper.

  “I am Rudolfo. You are Eddie McGehee.”

  “Let’s go out by the pool.” McGehee turned and wheeled away. His toes, long, crooked and naked, gripped the tiles with lazy prehensility. “Preston said you’d be coming today.”

  “How would Preston know?” wondered Rudolfo—aloud or to himself, he couldn’t say. He was no longer making much distinction between the two. But speaking of that, why hadn’t Preston reminded Rudolfo that Eddie McGehee stood closest to the heart of the mystery?

  “Preston is a very clever man. Guess what?”

  “What?”

  “He’s fucking Miranda!” McGehee announced this with bubbling glee. Rudolfo shuddered; his skin would likely have become goosebumpy, except goosebumps blossom around hair follicles, so all that happened was that he became a little clammy and damp.

  “Preston’s rather a lovely man,” McGehee put in. “He has beautiful eyes.”

  Rudolfo remembered his eyes as puffy and bloodshot, the centres dark as pitch.

  The pool was a huge lopsided circle. The water it held was crystal clear; on the bottom and sides were odd designs rendered with bright red and yellow paints. There was a small patio table, shaded by a huge polka-dotted parasol. McGehee gestured to one of the wicker seats and claimed another. Rudolfo sat down and came right to the point.

  “Why you auction Collection?”

  “Hmm.” It was a hmm to suggest that McGehee had never thought about it before. “Well, you know, I am the end of the McGehee line. I have left no offspring. There’s no one for me to bequeath the Collection to. So there.”

  “Charity.”

  “Sorry?”

  “You could leave it to charity. Or a library. Or a university.”

  “Yes, good point. Okay. Here’s answer number two. I needed the money. It’s not like I have a job or a profession. I don’t generate income. And let’s face it, I have an expensive lifestyle. So I needed the money.”

  There was something peculiar in McGehee’s manner, some kind of teasing mockery. Rudolfo reached across the table and gathered together the lapels of the terry cloth robe, pulling McGehee halfway across the table. Rudolfo watched his own twisted face zoom and loom, reflected in McGehee’s mirrored sunglasses.

  “Listen, bubby-boy,” he began—although Rudolfo was suddenly distracted, very distracted. Over Eddie McGehee’s head he saw Bob in satyric pursuit of the housemaid. Both were naked, both had bodies that had been pricked with design; raised welts and scars formed moons, stars and lightning bolts upon the gleaming blue-black surface of their skin. Both Bob and the maid were laughing, the maid with a measure of breathlessness, Bob with rhythmic concentration.

  They ran across the lawn and disappeared. Rudolfo shook his head and recommenced his bullying.

  “I am desperate man,” he said, keeping his voice low, barely audible. “I don’t know what is going on but is going on terrible. Jurgen, every day he changes. Every day I wake up and I must think to myself, oh no, today something else will be different. Every day I think, today there will be something new that I will not understand, Jurgen will be a little farther away from me, he will be more lost to me, and what can I do about it?” Rudolfo took a few deep breaths. He stared at his reflection in McGehee’s sunglasses. “Nothing.” He tightened his grip on the terry cloth lapels. “So tell me what I need to know or I will make you hurt.”

  “Okay,” said Eddie cheerily. “Here’s the scoop. My grandfather, Edgar Biggs McGehee, he left quite a complicated will. It’s full of riders and codicils. And one of those codicils has to do with the Collection. Basically, Rudolfo, I had to auction it off. That’s what my grandfather wanted.”

  Rudolfo released McGehee and sat back in his chair. “It was in will …?”

  “Oh yeah. Detailed instructions. Gramps was really quite specific. The Collection had to be put up for auction on April the sixth.”

  “Why? What is April six?”

  McGehee rose and turned to face the swimming pool. “Do you mean, what is the significance of April the sixth?”r />
  “Ja,” snarled Rudolfo.

  McGehee’s long crooked fingers worked at the knot in the cord that kept the bathrobe together. He peeled the garment off and revealed a lactescent body, its nakedness hidden by a loincloth, at least, a soiled length of sacking that clung to the man’s jagged hipbones like brush clings to a scarp. The openings for the legs were many times larger than they needed to be; wrinkled bits and pieces dangled below. McGehee reached up and removed his fez. A gossamer topknot was uncovered, curled up as though sleeping. Released, it tumbled down the length of the man’s back, bouncing along the ridge of vertebrae.

  “Among other things,” McGehee answered, “April the sixth is Harry Houdini’s birthday.”

  He then removed his sunglasses, tossing them nonchalantly onto a nearby chaise longue. He raised his hands above his head, bent his knees and prepared to execute a dive of antiquated fussiness. Just before he did, he turned and stabbed Rudolfo with his silver eyes.

  Samson knows the true source of all this trouble—the Grotto. He knows better than anyone, because at night he stood outside that strange room and listened to what was going on inside. He has large ears and could hear what Rudolfo could not. He could hear the little whimpers that Jurgen had sometimes made in there, whimpers caused by quick, sharp pains. Samson has also heard low moans, caused by pain of more substance.

  And the place smells, although human beings don’t seem to notice. It reeks of decay. And the air itself is odd, it bristles like the air above the desert when a violent storm is approaching.