The Haunting of James Hastings

by Christopher Ransom

  ‘Copeland is her maiden name?’ I said.

  Rick smiled. ‘Ask your friend on the LAPD to sort it out.’

  Detective Bergen would have known her maiden name. Copeland was a fake. An alias. Is that why he didn’t know about Aaron? What else had she faked?

  ‘’Nettie wanted to be a nurse. She ever tell you that?’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘She would have been a good one. She has a real touch. She should never have taken up with Arthur. Hotshot made her drop out. She kept her supplies, though. She gave me all this medicine and the little doctor’s kit. Told me to hold onto it, we might need it someday. Yes, sir, she has real vision.’

  Rick’s eyes sparkled.

  ‘Okay, you got me,’ I said. ‘Roll out the karaoke and I will turn up the flow.’

  ‘Maybe later,’ he said, as if he had been seriously considering just that.

  Keep him talking. ‘What happened to Aaron?’

  Rick’s mustache flattened and then began a slow bristling dance, an urchin moving across the ocean floor. He stared at me, waiting for me to answer my own question.

  ‘You think Ghost is responsible for . . . whatever happened, ’ I said.

  ‘What I think doesn’t matter. The change you instigate in others is undeniable. You destabilize the impressionable. You’ve seen the evidence. The ones that made the news.’

  The ‘news’ being the album in Aaron’s bedroom. ‘That’s ridiculous. You can’t blame an entertainer—’

  ‘Aaron’s story is the one that did not make the news,’ he said. ‘I made sure of that. To protect her. To protect us. And so you would never see us coming.’

  We stared at each other for a full minute without speaking. I didn’t understand what had happened. I only understood that Rick’s temper was rising, filling the room, and soon would blow.

  ‘He was a good boy. And you infected him.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Rick, no. I’m not Ghost. You can’t - it doesn’t work this way.’

  ‘What else would make a ten-year-old boy creep into the bedroom in the middle of the night and shoot his father in the head? And then turn the gun on himself? What kind of boy is capable of that?’

  I tried to think of an answer that would not further anger him. I couldn’t.

  Not quite singing, Rick began to recite a poem, employing the voice of a child in a cereal commercial.

  There’s a monster in my father and he makes

  Me cry

  There’s a gun in the closet and it’s just

  My size

  Daddy why’d you beat her with your boots?

  Why do you do the things the things you do?

  There’s a creature inside me and it looks just

  Like you

  Daddy why’d you leave us all alone you make

  Me cry

  Daddy should never have come back here

  To-night

  I found the magic silver bullets you left

  Be-hind

  Daddy why do you do the things the things you do?

  There’s a werewolf inside me and it looks just

  Like you

  Kiss me good night one more time, Daddy, tonight you’re

  Going to die

  Going to die

  Watch me pull this trigger I got silver bullets now

  Say bye bye

  Say bye bye

  The song was ‘Silver Bullet’. The fictional one Ghost had written about shooting his own father, after witnessing the old man beat his mother on Christmas Eve. That little domestic abuse ditty reached #1 on the Billboard singles and stayed in the Top 20 for eighteen weeks.

  ‘Your words,’ Rick said.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘In the form of a nursery rhyme. So that the children can understand. So they will follow you like the Pied Piper.’

  ‘I didn’t write that. I didn’t write any of his music. Will you listen to me for—’

  ‘Where is she!’ he shouted, his face shaking, clenching his fists in a way that would have been comical if he were not deadly serious. ‘What did you do with her?’

  ‘Nothing. I told you, I don’t know where—’

  ‘She’s not your wife! She’s not Arthur’s wife! You treated her like trash—’

  Something in me snapped. I sat up and screamed in his face. ‘It’s just a song, you fucking animal! Jesus Christ, if you want him so bad I can find him for you! I’ll give you his home address, his agent’s number, we can arrange a meeting. All it will take is one phone call to prove I’m right. Think! Use your head! You have the wrong man! ’

  Rick closed his eyes as if meditating. He rocked back and forth until his breathing returned to normal. I swallowed a sour lump of something medicinal that had built up at the back of my throat.

  ‘All right,’ Rick said. ‘All right. Since you refuse to accept responsibility, we’ll just see. We’ll just have to see about this.’

  He stood and walked to the smallest of his three large antique safes. He spun the brass arms left, then right, left again, then right, running the combination. The safe door groaned and clunked open. He reached in and removed an unmarked disc in a clear jewel case. His back blocked the open safe. I wondered what else he was storing in there. He shut the safe, spun the wheel and returned to his cabinet of audio components in the corner. There was a click and hiss as he inserted the disc. The big plasma television mounted to the wall facing the couch came to life with a hum, but the screen was still flat gray.

  ‘The windows are sealed,’ Rick said, facing me. ‘And there’s a grate welded into the top of the concrete wells. Everything behind these walls is cement foundation, and the door will be braced with a steel rod and two deadbolts. Your back’s probably broken. You’re cut up. I saved a few stuck cons on the shithouse, but I’m not a doctor and I don’t do stitches. Trying to bust out, running, these are not recommended. I’m telling you this to save you some trouble. I’m going to lock you in here now, and until I come back and open the door you won’t be able to leave. You will hurt yourself trying, and I can’t make you better. I won’t make you better. Think about that before you decide to go Shawshank on me.’

  He handed me a remote control and walked toward the stairs.

  ‘What happens after?’ I said. ‘When you find her, can I go home?’

  He watched me for a moment. ‘I know who you are, and soon you will, too. So I suggest you forget about home. There is no more home for you.’

  Rick shut the door to the basement. The doorknob clicked and latched, then something heavy slammed against the door, bracing it, I assumed. I listened to his big footsteps receding up the stairs until I was alone. The panic expanded in me until I thought I would scream and then expanded some more.

  I barely reached a sitting position before my back spasmed and the first bolt of real pain lit up my every limb. No escape. All right. I would watch the fucking video.

  What if there’s something horrible on it? Stacey said in the dark of the basement. What if it hurts you, honey?

  ‘How much worse could it get?’

  Stacey did not answer. I situated myself on the couch so that I was facing the television. I leaned back carefully until I was supported by the cushions and the pain began to ebb. I considered the remote. I looked up at the blank screen and pushed play.

  There is no more home for you.

  The black screen filled with swarming lights and familiar music.

  35

  The compilation lasts only twenty-four minutes.

  It begins in a club, the kind found in larger cities where global acts might deign to play three sold-out nights for a privileged two thousand fans. Art Deco sculpture climbs the walls, red velvet curtains on either side of the stage, racks of amps and speaker towers, a throng of waving hands, a stage with sickly orange lighting made dizzying by the handheld digital video camera that’s capturing this. Green lasers stab the room. A mirror ball throbs silver and red. The fo
otage quality is only marginally better than your average YouTube clip at first, and the large screen distorts it further. A cacophony of crowd cheer, drum machines, and of course the staccato, rapid-fire verse of the man himself. I understand we are at a Ghost show even before the camera finds him.

  We go in at waist level, pushing through plastic cups, long sweaty t-shirts and hospital patient wristbands, shaking asses and flying elbows. The camera mic fuzzes and whumps as the operator is shoved and jostled forward. But persistence pays off and things come into focus.

  The camera mic is too close to the stage; Ghost’s spit is unintelligible, and I catch myself trying to decide which song is playing. It’s not one of the dance numbers, like ‘Bikini Lines’. It’s ‘Chloroform Dayz’, maybe. The murder ballads are always dark and pummeling, surging, a primal assault of sidewalk-destroying beats, a verbal mugging you can’t quite grasp how it’s humanly possible, but as soon as it’s over you want it to happen again.

  The lens roves over a beautiful black woman lapping at the neck of a freakishly tall white guy who might be a Laker, up the wall, across the ceiling and settles on the other side, bringing into view a man most out of place.

  He is older than the others, a serious person, not dancing, exactly, but moving up and down short, rapid spurts, shoulders rolling, arching his feet in time with the beat. He is wound tightly, his jaw set. He wears a vintage orange-brown leather jacket. His cheeks are pasty and sweat trickles from under his foppish hair and light, feminine eyebrows. He turns and looks at me and only now do I realize I have been watching Rick Butterfield.

  The mustache is gone and he looks ten years younger and fifty pounds lighter - recent months have changed him for the worse. He reaches out, pulling the camera operator closer. A woman’s voice produces something like, ‘Come on, baby, let it out!’ This encourages him, and I guess his date is the one holding the camera. He removes his jacket and looks around, shrugs and drops it to the floor. He is an awful dancer, but his eyes, the glee with which he allows himself to be drawn into the grind and pound of Ghost’s relentless flow, almost fools me into believing he is enjoying this, not merely putting up with it for her benefit.

  The song ends like a recording studio on a flatbed truck with a bundle of dynamite strapped to the chassis hitting a brick wall. Fireworks rain. The camera goes up like a periscope and swings to the stage to capture the star. Ghost is standing with one foot on an amp, leaning forward like George Washington crossing the Delaware, his mic clenched in one brass-knuckled fist that jabs straight ahead and stops in a stark salute to the crowd. His head is down. The wife beater had been shredded right after the encore began, I know, and now he wears only his red track pants and red signature Cons. His torso is chiseled from ivory, his sweat streaming over the Emperor of Rap tattoo that adorns his abs.

  He is exultant, beautiful, terrifying.

  When he looks up and stares into the camera, right at me, there are tears flowing freely from his inflamed eyes. The tears are not of sadness. They are of rage and love and the ferocity he brings down from the gods. They are of poverty and fame, of black and white, of sex and death, of lust and addiction, of hunger and the endless appetite for their love of him. He cries because it cannot be contained. The ocean of emotion that ebbs and flows from them to him and back. It bursts him every time he performs. He stares into the lens daring all who would hold his gaze to try, just try and hold it, you can’t ever hold this, motherfucker, I never look away first. I will never back down. You will have to kill me first, and when you come for me you better make it a passion play.

  Then he cracks a smile and drops his head as the entire theater goes dark.

  The applause is volcanic.

  Rick, a silhouette in the darkness. He is staring into the space Ghost has vacated, his mouth open, eyes wide and glassy, wanting, wanting more of something that he did not know he came for. He is smitten. He has been touched.

  She holds on him for an extra beat and the scene cuts to black.

  A split second later we are on the street, the crowd almost totally dispersed. It might be Melrose or Sunset, but it’s definitely Los Angeles. Ah - the El Rey Theater on Wilshire. I recognize the marquee now. Ghost had played two nights there as a favor to one of the studios. I was very likely backstage right now, turning off the TV in one of the entourage rooms, sitting on a couch with a bottle of beer, talking trash with the other members of his posse. I can’t remember the date, nor what I did after. It was near the end of my tenure with Ghost, though, so I probably went through a standard decoy deployment out back where the usual crowd would be waiting while Ghost used a service exit.

  The camera finds its subject on a side street. Rick stands on the curb with his jacket slung over his shoulder, looking short-circuited. In his other hand is a small brown leather case about the size of a cigar box. Ahead of him are a handful of teens not paying attention, going their separate ways. The street is quiet and two big headlights come around the corner, then at us. A long white limo truck creeps, the windows tinted. It’s a stretch UV, Ghost’s limo. The limo comes to stop in front of Rick and he shifts the leather cigar box from hand to hand. He looks back at the camera, excited, this is it.

  A solid black rear side window glides down. I can’t see a face inside. The camera is lowered and I can’t see anything, but their conversation is clear.

  ‘You Ron Caspari?’ a deep voice asks.

  ‘The one and only,’ Rick says.

  ‘My guy says you got something special for us,’ deep voice says.

  ‘I do.’

  ‘I saw the photos. Didn’t look real. Is it here?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Show me.’ Something unlatches. After a beat the man says, ‘Ho-ly shit.’

  ‘Oh, man, that is the heat!’ someone else says. ‘Where’d you get that thing?’

  ‘I have friends,’ Rick says. ‘One of them is the warden of a state penitentiary where that was smuggled in by the former owner of a hedge fund. The warden owed me a favor.’

  ‘Musta been a big favor.’

  ‘The biggest,’ Rick says. ‘The only catch is he made me promise not to sell it, which is fine, because I’m not a dealer. Oh, and only five were produced.’

  ‘Where are the others?’

  ‘The man who developed the nano-polymer kept two for himself. The CEO of Blackwater bought one. The last one’s going to a certain sitcom star who can’t stop beating his wives.’

  ‘Char—’

  ‘Yes, that one.’

  Someone whistles.

  ‘That’ll sail through any airport screener in the world,’ Rick says. ‘Our gift to you.’

  ‘Why so generous, Ron?’

  ‘Take us for a ride. My wife wants to meet the man.’

  ‘She does, huh?’

  ‘In the worst way,’ Rick says.

  ‘Cool,’ the deep voice says. ‘Hop in.’

  I’d been there before, inside. Ghost’s agent and manager and two or three of his bodyguard friends would be passing around bottles of Cristal and a blunt or three. There would be club music pumping, and very soon a collection of young girls more than happy to attempt their first lap dances free of charge. But as I watched the feet and the hands and the floor carpet, the camera temporarily forgotten, what was going through my mind was, why them? What could he possibly have given them?

  Without the decibel levels from the theater overloading it, the mic captures the sound and we’re still rolling. Everyone’s hyped up from the show, talking over each other, four conversations at once. Shrill laughter. Hoots and hollers. When the lens lifts from the floor, they have reversed roles. Rick’s filming the woman now. Even though I knew all along, it takes me a moment to recognize her in the black hair and silver gown that makes her look like a raven-haired version of Michelle Pfeiffer in Scarface, but the freckles and her eyes when they look at me give it away.

  ‘You look familiar,’ a man says to her. ‘Were you at the show in Oakland last week?’
/>   ‘Nope,’ Rick says.

  Annette doesn’t answer. She is focused on Ghost, sitting next to him in the back seat. Ghost’s security supervisor and owner of the deep voice, Circus Mouse, is on her other side. So the back row is: a giant black dude, Annette, Ghost. Ghost is splayed out, taking up a lot of room with his legs as he opens the case and studies its contents. He holds the precious thing up, turning it from side to side.

  ‘Damn, you are beautiful,’ Ghost says, and kisses it.

  It looks like every .45 I have ever seen but slightly smaller. Also, it’s snow-white, as if made of porcelain. Not a single visible piece of the gun is metal. It looks completely fake, and for all I know Rick made it in his garage. Ghost puts it back in the box, latches the lid and passes it to someone in the opposite seat.