by Noel Hynd
“A coward!”
The internal voice shrieked at him so intensely that it jarred him. And for a moment, Brooks wondered if George Osaro had heard it, too. The minister seemed to jump slightly and looked around as well.
“All right,” Brooks said. “I’ll do it.”
The voice came alive to him.
“It won’t work, my craven friend. I won’t come to your party. But I’ll send my friends! We’ll put you and the girl in the earth with Hughes!”
“Go away,” Brooks thought in return.
Willpower. Like Osaro had said.
“Not now. We’ll converse later. Go!”
The voice fell silent. Brooks felt eyes upon him. He wondered from where a ghost was watching him. His eyes drifted to Osaro and settled upon him.
“Tim!” Osaro snapped.
Brooks looked at his friend, not knowing whether Osaro had heard something, disagreed with something, or read his thoughts.
“What?” Brooks answered.
“You’re going to ask me to be the third. I can tell.”
“That’s correct.”
“I can’t do it.”
“Why?”
“It’s an occult practice. It would cost me my position with the church here. And, more importantly, God knows what we might summon forth.”
“Are we going to wait until someone else gets killed?” Brooks asked.
“Summon up a whole legion of malevolent spirits, Tim,” Osaro said calmly, “and you’ll end up evacuating this island.”
“George, sometimes I think you’re creepy. The rest of the time I think you’re crazy.”
“Think what you want,” Osaro said, standing. “But if I fly a table with you, I’m signing my own ticket out of this parish. I’m not quite yet ready to do that.”
Annette sighed. Brooks met Osaro’s refusal with both relief and disappointment.
“Is there anything more I can do here right now?” Osaro asked. “If not, I have to get back to my church.”
He looked first to Annette, then to his friend.
Annette shook her head. “I’ll be all right,” she said. “Thank you.”
“It’s okay, George,” Brooks said. “You can go.”
They watched him leave. On the bench behind the house at 17 Cort Street, Brooks looked to the shaken woman sitting near him. He moved to her and carefully placed an arm around her shoulders. She leaned her weight toward him and laid her head against him.
“I have the worst impression,” she said, “that this will never end. That we’ll never get control over what’s going on here.”
He tried to reassure her, but there was little that he could say. To make any promise, he knew, would be to tell her a lie. He wondered, deep down he wondered, if someone else could be the third at the checkerboard table. And he wondered further if they could really make the table turn.
Chapter Forty-seven
In the days that followed, the island was alive with rumors. Dr. Herbert Youmans performed the autopsy on Emmet Hughes at the Nantucket Hospital. Nothing in the laboratory results detracted from his initial suspicion, linking the killing of Hughes to the deaths of Mary Elizabeth DiMarco and Bruce Markley.
The findings posed many mysteries beyond that of the killer’s identity. As Tim Brooks had suspected, no one had been seen going in or out of 17 Cort Street during the time surrounding Hughes’ murder. So how had a killer come and gone? How had it also happened that there were obvious parallels with the DiMarco slaying, and yet young Eddie Lloyd, the officially accused suspect in the first place, remained in jail? His family was unable to make the enormous bail.
What about fingerprints, also? And how about palm prints? The police wondered. The newspapers in Nantucket and on Cape Cod inquired. The only prints on the ice pick that had been driven into Hughes’ head had been his own. Yet it was outside the realm of reality that he could have committed that act upon himself. This point alone was enough to keep Lieutenant Agannis up at night.
Thinking. Pondering. And staring out his window into the darkness of two summer nights.
Suppose… Agannis kept thinking to himself. Suppose Detective Brooks’ supernatural theories carried even the remotest semblance of weight. He shuddered. Bill Agannis was a man in his late fifties and had witnessed his own share of inexplicable events over his lifetime. But there had never ever been anything quite like this.
For Agannis, here was the worst of all possible worlds. To deny that there was a supernatural angle to the killing, or killings, was to suggest that a human killer was loose on the island. But to accept the Brooks theory was to suggest something even more chilling… and to risk the outbreak of hysteria among the residents of the island.
Once again, there had never been anything quite like this. Nor had there ever been a series of crimes that so urgently begged for a solution.
For her part, Annette Carlson tried to behave as rationally as possible under the circumstances. She scheduled a follow-up appointment with her head doctor in Boston. And she made a point not to go into the Cort Street house by herself.
Over the course of two days, the rumor had traveled around the island that the murder of Hughes had pathological overtones. Rumors, half-baked tales and outright falsehoods had all fed upon each other. The word “witchcraft” had even been mentioned in some quarters. A shark at one of the local beaches might have caused less alarm. The recent murders were the first topic that summer tourists, arriving from off-island, wanted to know about. And worse for Annette, some of the local people began to mention to reporters that the slaying had been in the cellar of a movie star’s home. So it was a matter of time before the tabloid press, and subsequently the mainstream American press, would catch the story.
Annette dreaded it.
She thought of returning to California. But she initially rejected that. Her behavior would only appear more scandalous if she fled the East, she reasoned. And further, she kept hoping that Tim Brooks could find a third person to sit at the checkerboard table.
Come forth any spirit in our home!
Annette knew there were all sorts of spirits. And she wanted to reclaim her home from the more unruly of them. To reclaim the house she had purchased, would be to reclaim part of her life. And who would buy it now anyway, following a murder and the ensuing rumors? Gone now was the easy option of selling and leaving.
Tim Brooks. Well, he at least was a bright spot in her life, she reasoned.
She spent as much time as she could with him. He consoled her. He looked after her. He spoke to her with kindness when she thought she was again going crazy. And if he felt any fear of the situation, she could not pick it up from his behavior.
She moved out of Cort Street and took a pair of rooms at a guest house on Ash Street as she decided what to do. And whenever she went into her house at Cort Street to retrieve something, Tim came with her.
The inevitable, in terms of Annette Carlson and Timothy Brooks, occurred on August tenth, exactly one week after the death of Emmet Hughes. And it was the same day as the first reports hit the national newspapers and magazines that Annette’s “summer home”—this was what the press called it—had been the scene of a homicide.
Tim and Annette had spent much of the evening together. They had dined in a quiet corner of a restaurant called 21 Federal Street, a table upstairs away from the view of others. Afterward, they drove down to Cisco beach and walked together—half a mile down the shore, half a mile back—listening to the soothing crash of the waves.
He held her hand as they walked. And in a new sense, both Annette and Timothy tried to decide: Was this really happening? Was a romance imposing itself upon danger, upon tragedy, upon the other conflicts of their lives?
They soon knew the answer. Both of them.
When he mentioned something about taking her back to her guest house, she demurred at first. She did not wish, she said, to be alone.
“You can flop overnight at my place,” he offered. “If an actress doesn
’t mind staying with a cop again.”
“This actress doesn’t mind,” she said. “This actress would like to.”
She stopped and stood in front of him, facing him. And suddenly the pretension of their respective stations in life were no longer there. They were simply a man and a woman, enjoying being with each other. Wanting to be with each other. Not wishing to be away from each other.
His hands slowly went to her waist. She did nothing to discourage him. On the contrary, her lips came forward and met his. There was urgency within the kiss, as there frequently is when love is settling in for a long stay. There was even more urgency in the second kiss and the lengthy embrace that followed.
By this time, little question remained about the course of the rest of the evening.
Timothy drove her back to the guest house. He waited outside as she went upstairs to pack a few things for overnight. They drove to his cottage. He put some music on his CD player, found two brandy snifters in his bar and poured cognac for both of them.
They sat by each other on a sofa for several minutes. They savored the cognac and told each other funny stories about their very different pasts. Like mature adults, they worried that if they became lovers something might change between them, some barrier might rise, some conflict evolve. They looked for little men waving danger flags, but didn’t see any.
So, in the end, they each decided that really, when it came right down to it, there was no reason not to do what they both wished to do.
They rose and went to the next room. Playfully, they undressed each other. Passionately, when they were naked, they fell into each other’s arms. And that easily, they went to bed together and made love for the first time.
Afterward, his arm around her bare shoulders, they talked for a long time until sleep, like a good friend, arrived to claim them both.
Chapter Forty-eight
At a few minutes past two in the morning, Tim realized that he was awake. Annette slept beside him, her leg still against his. Her breathing was delicate and even. He looked at her in the dim light of the room and softly kissed her cheek. She did not awaken.
Then he rose. He silently left Annette’s side and walked from the room.
He closed the bedroom door behind him and turned on a hallway light.
The house was still and quiet. What had caused him to come awake? He wondered for a moment if it was there. The presence. He thought of speaking aloud to it, but decided not to.
He walked to his kitchen. He turned on the light.
He realized that he had developed a new mannerism, always scanning a room when he walked into it. The black ghost had changed his life in so many ways large and small, obvious and subtle.
He went to the refrigerator and uncapped a bottle of beer.
He sat down at his kitchen table.
He looked out a window into the night. He thought of the beautiful woman sleeping in the next room. He wondered what it would be like to share a bed with Annette for the rest of his life.
He smiled to himself. No, no use deluding himself, he decided. An affair was one thing. Love and a long relationship was something else. Who knew how many lovers she had or how casually she took them? A man a month? One a year? Two a week?
Normal in Hollywood—socially accepted behavior—was not the same as normal in eastern Massachusetts. What a joke. He was flattered that she would spend one night with him. Tomorrow morning, he figured as he sipped his beer, she would very civilly and very sweetly apologize for her mistake, explain how nothing possibly could ever work out between them and break the relationship off as suddenly as it had begun.
And all this, probably with good reason.
Something made him think of Heather Gold, his lover during his days in Chicago, lying naked next to him, taking the occasional and contemplative puff on a reefer after, as she so elegantly used to phrase it, “banging his brains out.”
Yes, Heather. Heather from seven years ago. As in, “Permanent relationships suck. Better start screwing some new people.”
He wondered where Heather was that night, as he seated himself at his small Formica kitchen table, on the lookout for a ghost, a new and unexpected lover in his bed in the next room. He wondered how many new people Heather had slept with in seven years—double figures surely, but where in double figures?—and he further wondered what had even made him think of her.
And then he knew why: The casualness of her physical relationships.
I’m tired of sex with you and so now I’ll try someone else. Changing partners was like putting on a different shirt. No big deal. And that was what was gnawing at him. One of the things, anyway. He expected, when dawn’s light came through the window, for Annette Carlson to have much the same attitude.
Which would have been fine, he further understood. Fine, except for the fact that she was out of his class, out of his league, out of his world, and he was falling in love with her.
His thoughts drifted. My, how they drifted in the sleepy consciousness of a new day’s earliest hours. They drifted like a corked bottle on an easy, distant tide. A bottle bearing a message. From whom? To whom? He didn’t know.
“Can’t see that far,” he said aloud.
He tried to sense if the ghost was present. He could almost tell now when it was or when it wasn’t.
Osaro’s words echoed. “I can go into a disturbed place and tell if there’s something there.”
Dr. Friedman’s learned ruminations echoed as well. “We should be able to contact the spirit world. But we’ve lost the skill. Or we’ve repressed the mental capability.”
Well, there was nothing repressed within his psyche anymore. Any skill that mankind had bred out through societal evolution, Timothy Brooks had reacquired within the last weeks.
And as for disturbed places? His mind was a disturbed place. And it would remain so until somehow this ghost business was resolved.
He sipped some cold beer. He sipped a second time. His mind continued to crank forward. He continued to stare into the nighttime darkness.
For most of his life, he had always believed that death was one’s earthly end. Heaven? Hell? Whatever followed was a matter of faith. Or a matter of philosophical conjecture. He had had loved ones die and never once had he sensed their presence in an earthly return. Never once had he received a message from beyond…
Beyond what? The grave?
The reality that he accepted? The universe as defined by modern Western thought? So what that Christ had purportedly brought Lazarus back from the dead? It was a nice reassuring story. Comforting. But wasn’t it much like the loaves and the fishes and the sun stopping in the sky during creation? Wasn’t it something that no rational, thinking person really accepted literally?
But now what could he believe? The unbelievable? That human souls could shoot around like invisible bullets or float like little clouds through walls, in and out of the consciousness of others, into and out of sight?
Like ghosts?
What could he believe, indeed? As his friend George Osaro had asked, how many realities were there? One? Three? Six million? Were they good? Evil? Some of each?
How could a human mind ever fathom what was really out there? And how could a small-town policeman, hunched over a bottle of beer at several minutes before three in the morning, hope to master any of this?
It would be enough just to survive.
Then, as his thoughts began to return to the room that he was in, he was aware of a certain sensation. It was something new. Nothing he had never known before. But it formed an intellectual link.
“Uh, oh,” he said aloud.
The more he stared out the window and into the darkness, the more the darkness took shape. What had once been solid black was now merely dark. And he could see within it. He could see the shape of his lawn furniture. He could see his car parked in the driveway. Faintly, on this overcast night, he could see the contours of trees and shrubs.
But now he sensed something more. And at last when h
is eyes drifted deeply into the darkness and—with a flash!—he came upon an upright figure that was foreign to his front yard.
“Oh, no,” he said softly. Yes, he had been right.
He knew what it was. Tall. Black within the darkness, the amorphous human shape. He had the sense of his eyes spiraling as he kept focused on it.
Arms… legs… torso…
Then the voice. “So! You finally know her carnally. My congratulations!”
Brooks didn’t respond.
“Wonderful body, yes? I’ve watched her dress and undress many times at Cort Street.”
“But I became her lover. Not you,” Brooks mumbled to the empty room.
“No matter! When I am ready, I’ll force myself upon her. And you will watch.”
“There are some things you will never do,” Brooks whispered. “And that is one of them.”
There followed a brief silence, as if the malevolent spirit were taken aback. And when it spoke again, it was more sardonic. Arch. Belligerent.
“Don’t think for a moment that you satisfied her, however, Timothy. You couldn’t satisfy anyone. Yourself. Your father. The imagined god or Savior of your church. A woman.”
Brooks glanced away and sipped more beer.
“I’m not listening to you,” Brooks said aloud.
“But of course you are! We are conversing now!”
“What I mean is,” said Brooks evenly, “I hear you. But I am not listening.”
“You have no choice but to listen. I come from the other side of life. You will have to hear me.” There was a pause. “I have many ways of arresting your attention.”
Abruptly, through the wall, Brooks was assaulted by a foul smell. It was a horrible stench. Brooks tied to place it. It was like an overflowing sewer. It was like…
“Is that you?” Brooks asked, recoiling very slightly. The smell was like…like what in his past?
“Merely one of my tricks. A present for you. Now that you’ve defiled that woman you can both rot in the same coffin.”
Then Brooks realized. That was it! The smell was like decaying flesh. Tie memory flashed back from his days on the police department in San Jose. The trips to the morgue. The medical examiner’s office. The stanching fetid bodies found in car trunks, brains perforated by bullets, the filthy reeking winos and drug addicts, lying in back alleys and cheap hotel rooms, dead for days in urine-soaked excrement-stained pants.
