GHOSTS: 2014 edition (THE GHOST STORIES OF NOEL HYND # 1)

by Noel Hynd

  Someone—or something — had entered Mrs. Lewis’ house overnight or in the early morning when Mrs. Lewis went out for a walk. The someone had come with a large antique knife, a macabre old carving utensil that was rusted all along the length of the blade. The intruder had taken nothing and apparently touched very little. In fact, little in the house had been touched—with one glaring exception.

  In Mrs. Lewis’ library there was a large print reproduction of DaVinci’s Last Supper. The print had been savagely vandalized. The intruder had used the blade of the rusted knife to carve an unspeakably foul obscenity into the print. Then he had thrust the knife directly into the figure of Christ standing among his apostles. The knife remained stuck where the intruder had left it, the blade horizontal, jutting into the figure of Jesus below the chin and above the shoulders.

  Straight through the throat, probably not by coincidence. Brooks suddenly felt a second wave of even deeper revulsion, something that actually made him shiver. Then that morphed into a deep anxiety, an anxiety that built to another shudder and then to an overwhelming fear.

  He repressed it and didn’t let Mrs. Lewis sense it.

  “How horrible,” he heard himself saying as he attempted to comfort the woman. She refused to even look at the destruction and desecration any further. But Brooks’ eyes were riveted, examining the subtext of this act, the underlying horror, depravity, sacrilege and defiance to any standard of decency.

  Mrs. Lewis said that her doors had been locked at all times. And the knife was not hers. And who, she said, in another eerie echo of the Molloy farm incident, would do something like this? What sort of madman?

  What sort, indeed? Brooks asked himself.

  Brooks used a paper towel from the woman’s kitchen to remove the carving knife from the print. He was careful to preserve any fingerprints that may have been upon it. But even pulling the knife from the wall was a struggle. It had been plunged deep into the woodwork beneath the print. How any pair of human hands could have been that strong was something Brooks couldn’t comprehend. Tim Brooks was a fit young man, solid through the shoulders and arms, but he needed both of his own hands and all of his strength to dislodge the knife.

  He decided to take both the print and the knife to the police station to be examined as evidence. Yet, more and more, he sensed that a confrontation was coming with an enemy that George Osaro deeply feared and that he, Brooks, had not yet even begun to understand.

  This thought was reinforced as he left the Lewis home and walked back to his Jeep. Inexplicably, caught beneath the windshield wipers of his car was a cluster of small white feathers. Brooks brushed them aside and attributed them to the seagulls which were omnipresent on the island and always shedding. It was only when he was halfway back to town that a deeper darker realization was upon him.

  The feathers were downy and small, not the type specific to seagulls at all. They had been duck feathers, much like—if not exactly like the ones in evidence at the slaughter on the McCoy farm.

  Brooks knew the feathers hadn’t been there when he had entered the Lewis home. And the farm was several miles away. So how had they arrived there?

  And why?

  And why at that particular moment?

  He went back to the notion he had entertained on leaving Mrs. Lewis’s home, the thought about a confrontation looming with something depraved, unholy and unimaginable. He was more convinced than ever that the moment of reckoning was nearer than he might have imagined.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Annette telephoned Tim Brooks the next morning. She asked him to meet her on one of the uncrowded beaches at Madaket. She wanted to talk and walk. He agreed.

  She was waiting when he pulled his Jeep to a halt at the side of a sandy road. She wore a pale blue T-shirt and a short yellow skirt. She watched him through dark glasses, big round owlish ones. He greeted her with a smile and a wave. He walked to where she stood.

  On the beach, away from Cort Street, the source of her torment, he was conscious of her in a different way. How attractive she was. How delicate her face was. How beautiful her tan arms and legs were in the sunlight. The entire way she stood there and held herself was…

  “Hello,” he said, cutting off any impropriety within his own thoughts.

  “Hi,” she answered. She smiled slightly. “I wanted to talk somewhere away from the house. Is this okay?”

  “It happens to be one of my favorite places on the island. You can see why.”

  She agreed that the shoreline was beautiful. Then, “Look,” she said. “Again we’re speaking in confidence. Can we?”

  “Of course.”

  “Good.” She drew a breath. “Let’s walk,” she said. They turned away from the sun. She held a pair of sandals in her right hand, dangling them by the ankle laces. The beach was beautiful, but remote, populated with only a few bathers, a few families, and one diehard fisherman.

  “I wanted to have this conversation away from the house,” she said. “You’ll understand why. Never know who or what is listening within those walls.” She glanced to him from behind her dark glasses. “Know what I mean?” she asked.

  “I know what you mean,” he answered.

  “Do you think we’re crazy, you and I?” she asked next. “Mentally unbalanced? A few screws loose here and there? And that’s why we think we see things?”

  “No,” he said.

  “That’s your honest impression?” she pressed.

  “That’s my professional response,” he said. “But, remember. I’m a detective not a doctor.”

  She kept walking.

  “So maybe we are both crazy,” she said. “Or delusional.”

  “Doubt it, Miss Carlson,” he assured her again. “But why are you trying to make that point?”

  She smiled secretively. To the casual observer, they might have been any young couple on a vacation.

  “Please call me Annette,” she said. “And I’ll drop the ‘Detective Brooks’ stuff and call you, ‘Tim.’ Or Timothy,” she said. “Whichever you prefer.”

  “Either,” he said.

  She was silent for a few steps. “I’m not trying to make the point that one or both of us is crazy or delusional, Tim,” she said. “I’m trying to rule it out.”

  He was confused and admitted it.

  She drew a breath. “I want to tell you something so that you don’t get the wrong idea. A few years ago, after my mother’s death, I was under a doctor’s care for depression,” she said, a breeze gently tossing her hair. “I was even hospitalized for a short time in Connecticut. I’ve recovered. Completely. Or at least I think I have.”

  He walked by her side and listened.

  “I don’t want to slip back,” she said. “I don’t want these ‘occurrences,’ at Seventeen Cort Street to push me backward. Do you know what I’m saying?”

  He thought he did, and said so.

  “So I’ve made arrangements to see a doctor in Boston. Tomorrow. He’s a psychiatrist. I want to know I’m sane and not slipping.”

  “Have you ever seen him before?” Brooks asked. A bright red Frisbee, thrown by a handsome blond boy of about ten, eluded a second boy and landed in the sand near Annette.

  Brooks picked it up and threw it back, a fine smooth throw with a dash of backspin. The Frisbee caught a current and sailed upward as if it were ascending in an elevator shaft. It delighted the boys who laughed at the funny trajectory and gave chase.

  “The doctor’s name is Gary Rossling,” Annette said. “He’s the former associate of a doctor I was seeing in California. Studied at Berkeley with him, or maybe it was UCLA. I don’t know.” She sighed. “I called this morning and had copies of my records sent to his office in Boston.”

  “I’m still not sure why you’re sharing this with me,” Brooks said. “You certainly don’t have to.”

  “I’m telling you because I’m going to see this new psychiatrist in Boston tomorrow,” she explained. “I don’t want you to think that I’m not coming
back. And I also didn’t want you to think that I was crazy all along.”

  “You have no danger of either,” he said.

  “Good,” she said. “Thank you.”

  She walked several more steps in silence and Brooks knew that she was summoning up the nerve to move the conversation to its next level.

  “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking,” she said. “About the house. About this thing that’s in it.” Her gaze settled into his again, then she looked to the distance. “A haunted house. That’s what I have, don’t I? That’s what these things are called.”

  “I suppose they are.”

  They continued to walk. She formed her thoughts. “When I was a little girl,” she said, “my father fell ill. I was about thirteen. He couldn’t work. The bank foreclosed on him. Took our home. We rented and lived in apartments for a few years. Finally, my father got some money together and we bought a new home.”

  Brooks listened.

  “He always told me, and I always told myself, that if I had any financial success as an actress, I should buy my own place. Buy it with cash and then hang on to it forever. Then it’s mine. It’s my home and no one can take it from me.” She smiled sweetly. “I always wanted a quirky antique house in the Northeast. Something with charm and a lot of character. That’s what I have now on Cort Street,” she said.

  “With maybe a bit more character than you bargained for,” he suggested.

  “Quite a bit more,” she said. “But the fact is, this is my house. This spirit that’s in it. This ghost. Or these many ghosts. I don’t care what world these things came from. This is my home now. I’m not letting them run me out.”

  “You’re very brave,” he said

  “No. Just a stubborn.”

  He laughed. “I don’t think that at all.”

  She stopped walking.

  “You mentioned something about a friend of yours,” she said. “A priest? A man who knows about similar hauntings on the island?”

  Brooks nodded.

  “He’s a Lutheran pastor,” Brooks said. “I wanted to bring him over to the house, in fact. Talked to him just yesterday. He says he has… this gift. He can tell if something’s present.”

  She seemed to accept that such talents existed.

  “We know something is there,” she said. “I want to know how to lose it.”

  “Sometimes he can tell exactly what’s there,” Brooks said. “To my mind, that would be the first step in understanding how to get rid of it.”

  She nodded. “How to exorcise it?” she asked.

  “So to speak.”

  She considered this for a moment. “What’s his name?”

  “Reverend George Osaro.”

  “Will he come over?” she asked hopefully.

  Brooks told her about the minister’s current antagonisms with the archdiocese over exactly this type of thing.

  “Too bad. We could have used him,” she said.

  “It doesn’t mean he won’t change his mind eventually,” Brooks said. “I’m hopeful that he will. I’m going to keep working on him.

  Annette nodded, mildly despondent.

  He tried to pick up the mood.

  “I wonder if I could take another tour of your house,” he asked. “I’d like to have a serious walk-through. See if I can sense anything. Or see anything new.”

  “We could do it right now,” she suggested.

  “I have to go back to my office and I have some other pieces of business,” he said. “Tomorrow?”

  “I fly to Boston tomorrow. Remember?”

  “Ah. Yes. Of course.”

  “So it would have to wait till Thursday,” she said. “Unless you want to do it tomorrow by yourself.”

  “Alone?”

  “Yes,” she said. “There’s a big grayish-brown rock in the flower garden just beneath the kitchen window. I can leave a key there.”

  “That doesn’t bother you?” he asked. “If I go in by myself.”

  “I might prefer it that way.” She laughed.

  He smiled.

  “Do you need a lift to the airport then?” he asked. “I can drop you and pick you up. Tomorrow’s my day off, to the extent that I ever take one.”

  “That would be great,” she said. “I accept.”

  Then, impulsively, she surprised him as well as herself. She leaned forward and kissed him lightly on the cheek. She gave him a smile and thanked him again. Then she turned. He walked with her, back to where they had left their cars. He watched her drive away, still feeling the spot on his cheek that her lips had touched.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Returning to Cort Street, Annette parked her car in front of the house. She walked to the back door and found a courier pack that had arrived during the afternoon. She hefted it in her hand. It felt like three more scripts to read. The package bore the return address of Joe Fischer in Los Angeles.

  Annette walked into the house and opened it. It was in fact three scripts, just as she had guessed. But the scripts were related. They were Part One through Part Three of a planned big-budget cable TV production, a miniseries based on a best-selling World War II-era novel titled Message From Berlin.

  She groaned when she realized what they were.

  “Oh, Joe,” Annette muttered hopelessly, setting the scripts aside. “You know I hate working in cable TV.”

  There was a covering letter clipped to the top script. She decided it could wait, as she had no desire to involve herself in a network movie.

  Somewhere upstairs in the house, the floorboards gave a distant creak. Not once, but twice, and in different spots. Annette glanced at the ceiling above her, and felt her heart skip for a moment.

  “Go away,” she said aloud. There was no further noise from above.

  In the evening, she called Emmet Hughes, the island handyman, and hired him to fix the plaster in the living room where the old cabinet had fallen—or been thrown—forward.

  Half an hour later, Annette was more relaxed. She was comfortably at work in the kitchen of her house. A foul mood had partially lifted. Her world shone as a brighter place.

  Annette considered the steps she had taken that day—the hiring of Emmet Hughes, the handyman, and the immediate appointment with Dr. Gary Rossling, the psychiatrist. Annette came to view them as positives. In putting anything in order, she concluded, first steps had to be taken in every direction. Additionally, of course, she had fixed her resolve to battle for her house. How dare these spirits—if they were spirits—think they could drive her out!

  She smiled. Overall, she managed to convince herself that she was pleased.

  That same evening at seven, Tim Brooks stood at the foul line on the basketball court behind the high school. He was alone. He drew a breath and lofted the ball in a perfect arc toward the hoop.

  Swish. Not even a rim.

  He repeated. Swish again. A third shot matched the uncanny accuracy of the first two.

  If there was one thing in life Tim Brooks could always do successfully, it was sink foul shots. Particularly when he was angry. Foul shots focused his attention and worked off his anxieties. Therapy. That’s what it was.

  He should write a book someday, he told himself as he retrieved a shot that had rolled off the court. He envisioned the title: The Foul Shot Method of Stress Management.

  Yeah, sure, he thought to himself. Make a million bucks and quit my job. Make a million bucks and marry an actress. “Yeah, sure!” he muttered aloud.

  In his quiet, methodical way, Timothy Brooks was in a rage. He walked back to the free throw line. He tossed two more shots up in quick succession, hardly aiming. One skinned the rim and settled through the net. Another swept around the rim and fell in. So did the next one. He dropped nine more in succession, missed one, and then methodically sank eight more in a row before missing two.

  “Come on! Focus, would you?” he grumbled to himself. “Concentrate!” He went back to the foul line, shooting, retrieving, shooting, and retrieving. Eight
een hits in a row.

  Finally! Much more like it. If only, he reckoned, he could channel the other forces and events in his life as neatly as he could direct a twelve-inch round ball through a sixteen-inch hoop.

  His thoughts weren’t even on basketball. He finally admitted to himself that they were upon Annette Carlson.

  “Out of your league,” he told himself. “Untouchable. Unapproachable. Probably has some hunk back in California who sends her into ecstasy, you halfwit! That or she sleeps with every weasel-faced producer in town to land those top roles!”

  All of this came to Tim Brooks as he shot baskets. He felt a deep wave of discontent sweep over him.

  This was not how he had envisioned things when he was growing up. In his fantasies then, all desirable things were attainable. When he finally met the woman who sent his heart spinning, he had imagined, he would woo her, court her, romance her and enjoy success with her. Later he would many her. And spend a long happy life raising two adorable children with her.

  Life, he had long since learned, was not like that. Annette Carlson was successful in her field, young, pretty, single, and all she would ever be to him was a facet of a strange breaking-and-entering case and a chapter in another Nantucket ghost story.

  He took a shot from the top of the key. Swish.

  Annette has her career, he thought. Elsewhere.

  Another shot from the foul line. Swish.

  Annette has a lover. Elsewhere.

  A jump shot from the corner. Swish.

  Annette has a life of her own. Elsewhere.

  He walked over to a plastic bottle of chilled water that he had brought with him. He drank.

  There was no room in Annette Carlson’s life to ever include him. He was a town cop. Nothing more. Nothing less. The reality of his situation settled upon him. For the first time in his life, when he suddenly wanted to be more, he realized that he couldn’t.

  Some of his father’s choicer words haunted him from years gone by.

  “Is that all you aspire to, son? Is that all you want to be? With your potential? With the education you have?”