“If memory serves,” replied Ulrich, “there was never a formal contract signed, so you can take this job and shove it up your ass. But how would you have me talk to you? Your daughter's been following me. I've seen her numerous times, have even spoken to her. Her spirit will never know rest because her grudge is so strong. Every night she relives her suicide a hundred times, mourning for the life she never enjoyed. You know what she told me? That no one ever listened to her. That the people in her life were never there. You painted yourself as a saintly father, Michael, and I was a damned fool to ever fall for the ruse. Now that I've seen through the deceit your family has woven, I understand why your daughter sought an untimely end, and why she's still lingering on.” He made his way to the door. “Don't call me again. I'm washing my hands of this case.”
Michael shuddered with rage, his eyes fixed on the scenery outside the window. He didn't move to stop the investigator, and instead fogged up the glass with his heavy breathing.
Ulrich slipped out of the office, down the stairs, put on his coat and was out the front door a moment later. Trudging over to his Passat, he sat down in the driver's seat and cast one last look up at the enormous estate. Michael was still standing in one of the second story windows, staring down at him as he departed.
It was hard to say from this distance, but Ulrich thought he spotted a face marked not with anger, but wet with tears in that window.
20
He was back in his apartment, standing in front of the bathroom sink. He'd washed his hands twice, had taken another quick shower, but couldn't do anything to make himself feel clean again. The morning's errand had left him with a bad taste in his mouth. It'd felt good to confront Michael on Vivian's behalf. He felt he'd done the right thing, but something still bothered him.
It didn't matter who he chewed out, who he confronted with the facts.
The important thing to remember was that there was still a spirit out there who was doomed to suffer every night. On the roof of the Prescott, Vivian was forced to relive her death every night. He wished there was some way to rescue her from this, to help her move out of this world so that she might know peace. Staring at himself in the mirror, face dripping wet and haggard, he could think of nothing to that end.
The day was spent in an ordinary fashion. He stayed at home, ordered a small lunch to be delivered from the local Chinese takeout down the road, and listened to some jazz on his turntable. Though he watched his phone all afternoon and expected Michael to make an either harassing or apologetic call, the only person who called him that day was his friend, Harrison.
“Harlan, you can't keep putting me off,” began Harrison. “Christmas is two days away now. What are you doing? I want you to spend the evening with us. Dean and Roberta are coming by, and there will be tons of food. What have you been up to since I last called? You been dead to the world or something?”
Ulrich snickered. “You could say that. I've been busy with a case, but I think all of that's done now. It was a disappointing one, a bummer. Couldn't help anyone involved this time around.” He shrugged. “If I come by for Christmas, can I bring the cat?”
Beardsley crawled over the sofa cushions and extended a paw just far enough to knock a chopstick off of Ulrich's half-eaten container of lo mein.
Harrison laughed. “I see how it is. You've taken a real shine to that cat, am I right? Harlan Ulrich, animal lover. I can't get over it! Who'd have thought? Yeah, I can run it by the wife. No reason to leave the little guy all alone on the holiday.” He laughed. “All right, Harlan. I'm going to pencil you in. There's going to be a spot at our table for you. It's official now. If you don't turn up, you're going to break our hearts, got it?”
Ulrich stood up and stretched. “Geeze, no pressure.”
“See you then, five o'clock for drinks and appetizers. Sound good?”
“I suppose so.” Ulrich hung up the phone and tossed it onto the couch. “Can you believe it?” he muttered to the cat. “Christmas is two days away. Where have we been? It doesn't feel like a holly-jolly time of year to me, you know?” He shook his head, cleaned his mouth off with a napkin and pulled a Perrier out of the fridge. “Not in the Christmas mood. Though, that's nothing new with me. Never have been one for the holidays, even as a kid.” Returning to his seat, he begrudgingly allowed the cat to perch on his lap, and he even stroked his fur for a time. “Too many memories associated with all of that.”
The afternoon transitioned into evening and a thin snow began to fall. Ulrich ran through his stock of jazz records and found himself putting on the Sinatra Christmas album out of boredom. He flopped back down on the couch as Ol' Blue Eyes started crooning “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” and perched his ankles up on the coffee table. Draping a blanket over his legs, he closed his eyes and let the sound fill him. It sounded fine to his ear, but in his mind it stirred uncomfortable memories.
He could see himself as a young man, sitting in the family home, wondering where his father was. Memories of petty arguments with his mother reared their heads and he couldn't help but think himself silly for ever having gotten worked up over trivialities. He remembered lonely, quiet Christmases, and the sounds of records like this one turning in the old house, the vocals jumping off of the walls and filling the empty space with a ghostly energy.
He turned to the cat, blinking away the heaviness in his eyes. “You know what makes me feel worst about this case? About the girl, Vivian? I sort of knew what it was like, to be alone all the time. My childhood was fine enough, but I spent a lot of time by myself, with no one to look out for me. No one to listen. My father, he ran off. And my mother, though I didn't understand it at the time, she was working her tail off to take care of me. That's the way it goes... sometimes.” Smiling, he pet Beardsley's head as he curled up on the armrest. “That's enough talk, I suppose. Now that the work's done, I think we deserve a nap, yeah?”
The record turned and, slowly, Ulrich's head lolled to one side. Before too long, he and the cat had drifted off.
The investigator proved tired enough to dream, and when he did so he slipped into a place he knew perfectly well. The setting of this dream was his childhood bedroom in a kind of sepia tone. The place looked and felt the same; even the air smelled like he remembered it.
The clock on the wall told him it was seven in the evening, though the outside looked so dark that he'd have thought it midnight. There wasn't much snow on the ground; instead, a terrible cold swept past the ice-stiff scenery outside his bedroom window. Seated on the edge of his bed, Ulrich peered out into the hallway.
From the kitchen, the sounds of his mother toiling at the stove reached his ears. “Dinner's almost ready,” she called. The familiar tones of her voice, which existed now only as a memory, were so jarring to listen to that he nearly jerked awake. From outside his room, too, came a low stream of Sinatra. He'd moved onto “White Christmas”, and his mother hummed with the chorus.
Ulrich peered around the dark room, made out the shapes of all of his childhood furnitures, each of them placed precisely where he remembered them. And yet there was no doubt in his mind that this was a dream. Running his hands against his face, he found they still felt rough, aged. He wasn't reliving his youth so much as revisiting it for an instant.
Standing up, he made his way into the hallway, Sinatra's singing growing louder, and started for the kitchen. Theirs was a little house; two bedrooms, one bath and a kitchen which was attached to a laundry room. He didn't have to go far to see his mother's silhouette as she stood in front of the stove, vigorously stirring something in a pot. At sighting her, he immediately halted, his legs trembling like they might give out on him. It'd been years since his mother had been among the living, and still more since he'd seen her in her prime. This memory was probably decades old. In it, his mother's blonde hair was still long and lustrous. She was wearing a white apron and wasn't yet so worn down by working multiple jobs. When his father had left, she'd been forced to pick up the slack howev
er she could, though it was clear that this memory took place before all of that. It was a happier time.
“M-ma?” uttered Ulrich, frozen at the threshold of the kitchen. He couldn't believe his eyes; everything was so real. Running a hand against the nearest wall, he fancied he could feel the texture of the floral wallpaper. “Ma? Is it... is it really you?”
“Hm?” replied his mother, absorbed in her work. “Go ahead and sit down, dear. Your father will be home from work any minute now. We want to be all ready when he gets home, right? It's Christmas, after all.”
Ulrich glanced at the little dining room table in the corner, which boasted three place settings. Just beyond it, its bulbous bulbs glowing warmly, was a small Christmas tree. Ulrich shook his head, chuckled. “Dad? Dad is... dad is coming home?”
His mother was singing along to the music and had bent down to look at something in the oven. Still standing there, incredulous, Ulrich paced towards the table and pulled out a chair. Even though he knew it was a dream; even though it was just a distant memory that was now drifting through his consciousness, he felt a jolt of excitement at the prospect. It'd been years, decades, since he'd seen his father. The thought of him walking in through that door at any moment was enough to make his heart race. Is he really coming? Is he going to walk in and...
The front door was unlocked from the outside, and then fell open. Sitting up like a hopeful child despite his years, Ulrich smiled. “Dad?”
That was when things changed.
Suddenly, the air wasn't warm anymore. He couldn't smell his mother's cooking any longer, couldn't hear the Sinatra. The Christmas tree was gone, and instead he found himself sitting in a darkened space, alone. He glanced around for several moments, looking for his mother, for some trace of the warm memory he'd been enjoying only moments prior, but it'd all evaporated.
And then, from across the dream space, there came a persistent squeaking noise like a hinge in need of grease. A wheelchair rolled out of the darkness, and in it was seated Vivian Poole. She was, thankfully, in one piece. Her long hair was draped over one shoulder and she presented with an uneasy smile, looking more or less like the girl he remembered from the photograph.
“Vivian?” Ulrich swallowed hard, all the good cheer in him loosed in a single sigh. “What are you doing here? What is this?”
The girl's smile didn't disappear. It just became a little sadder. “Not happy to see me? Don't worry about it. I'm used to that.”
“That's... It's not that, I...”
“You weren't planning on seeing me again, were you?” she continued. “Thought you were done with me, right?”
The words on the investigator's lips died and he simply nodded.
“You asked me a question, once. You wanted to know why it was I chose you. And I told you why. Do you remember what I said?”
He had to rake through his memory to turn up the conversation between them on that rooftop. “You... you said that you chose to follow me because I'd been there. I didn't know what you meant.”
The specter nodded, a few chestnut locks spilling down onto the sleeve of her sweater. Then, she motioned to the darkness around her. “That's right. Like me, you know what it's like to be alone, to have no one you can talk to. You know disappointment, what it is to feel abandoned. Not everyone knows that. Some people in this world are very lucky, and they go their whole lives without experiencing much of that. But like me, you were there, once. You know something of what I felt. And that's why we had a connection,” she explained softly. “Over the years, I could only show myself to people like that. But none made the effort to listen like you did.”
“I see.” This made sense, and the investigator felt at ease knowing that Vivian hadn't come as a foe, but as a friend this time. “Well, for what it's worth, I'm sorry. I'm sorry that your life went the way it did, and that there was no one there for you when you needed it most. I hope that you'll be able to move on now.”
Vivian bobbed her head agreeably, but her smile shrank and a peculiar yellow light came to haunt her watery eyes. And then she began to shake her head. “No... no, not yet. Sorry, but there's still something I need to do. I can't rest. Not until he understands.” For an instant, the facade of lovely youth fell away and the scored, blood-colored face of a ghoul flashed into view. “Because I'm going to make him understand.”
“You're going to... to make him understand?” asked Ulrich. “What will you do?” Before his very eyes, the wheelchair retreated into the darkness, leaving only two mustard yellow eyes glowing back at him from the shadows. “Vivian, please... what are you doing? What are you thinking?”
Ulrich awoke with a jerk, knocking Beardsley onto the floor. The record had long since quit and the only sound to be heard in the apartment was the pleasant crackle of the turntable. The air felt cold, though, like he'd left a window open.
Or as if someone who'd just wandered in from the cold had been there with him.
“Vivian,” he managed, wiping the sleep from his eyes. “She's not done yet. She's... she's going to go after Michael.” Rummaging around in the blanket, he found his cell phone. It was an hour out from midnight. “What could she be up to? What does she have planned?” The cat circled his feet as he considered making a call to Michael. Should I try to warn him? After a moment's hesitation, he decided to dial the number. He didn't like the man, didn't want to associate with him, but couldn't sit idly by and watch as his daughter exacted her revenge from beyond the grave.
The call, which he placed twice, went to voicemail. That wasn't a good sign. It was possible that Michael simply didn't want to talk to him after their earlier dustup, but even so, the lack of an answer made him more than a little nervous. Grabbing up his coat and keys, Ulrich stepped into his shoes and decided he would drive by the Poole residence to have a look. “Better safe than sorry,” he muttered. “If I don't go over there and check on him, there's no telling what might happen.”
The Passat's engine chirped in protest of the cold as he started her up. He backed out of his space, left the apartment lot and started through the icy streets at greater speeds than were wise. Time was of the essence.
He knew something was wrong before he even pulled into the driveway.
All of the lights were on in the grand house, and there was no car in the driveway. He parked hastily, leaving the key in the ignition, and bound up to the front door where his heavy knocking was answered by Meredith. During this meeting, she didn't even attempt to hide her disdain and threw open the door with a "What do you want?" Behind the venom in her tone Ulrich recognized something else, too.
Worry.
"Is Michael in? I need to speak with him right away." Ulrich looked past the woman impatiently, into the foyer and beyond. "I tried to call but he didn't answer. It's urgent."
"No," she replied breathlessly. "He's been ignoring my calls, too. Just a bit ago, in a bit of a panic, he got dressed and said he had to go. Let me tell you, in all our years of marriage that man has known better than to ignore my phone calls. He claimed it was business-related, but Michael has never been called away to business this late at night. I don't know what got into him. He seemed nervous, frightened. I've called a dozen times but all I get is the voicemail. Why, what do you want with him? After you left this morning he was in an awful mood, hardly spoke at all."
Ulrich began stepping away from the door, retreating to his car. "Never mind, then. I... I need to go." He tuned out Meredith and instead tried to think of where Michael might've gotten off to. If Vivian was going to lure him somewhere to exact her revenge, then where would she do it?
The answer was clear to him almost immediately. "The damn hotel," he uttered, backing out at full speed. When he was on the road again he pointed the car in the direction of the nearest on ramp and bounced onto the almost empty highway.
Looking constantly to the clock on the dash, he hoped he'd have the time to intervene. Nothing would be more disappointing than for him to arrive moments too late.
Barely able to remain in his lane, Ulrich swerved to the right and took one of several downtown Toledo exits. From there he was able to hurriedly navigate the side streets until he was approaching that abandoned quarter where the hotel stood. Whipping past a row of shuttered warehouses and a couple of abandoned junkers, Ulrich caught the faint glow of the Star Diner's signage up ahead and felt some relief. He was close now.
Leaving the diner behind he sped to the next intersection, spotting the hulking old building and an SUV parked alongside one of its flanks. Screeching to a halt alongside the vehicle, Ulrich killed the engine and burst out into the night. "Michael?" he called, looking for signs of the man in and around the SUV. The engine of the abandoned vehicle was cold; Michael had been there for a little while, by the looks of it.
Not good. What if he's gone inside the building? Ulrich turned to the Prescott; more specifically, to the second story, through which he'd learned to sneak in. Had Michael found the same entrance and entered the building? Rushing towards the fire escape, Ulrich tried again to call out to him. "Michael! Can you hear me?"
There was no response, save for a howling of the wind through a cracked window above.
He pulled open the second story door and was in the building in the next instant. He didn't know the space particularly well, certainly not as well as Michael, the previous owner, would have known it, but he started for the stairwell and called out at the top of his lungs. "Michael? Anyone? Is there anyone here?"
The silence unsettled him.
The third and fourth floors were similarly empty, as were the fifth and sixth. Out of breath, Ulrich began to wonder if Michael had ever entered the building at all. Returning to the dark stairwell, the light from his phone bouncing off the walls of dark concrete, he suddenly realized there was only one place worth checking.
Darkside Blues: An Occult Thriller (The Ulrich Files Book 3) Page 14
