The Haunting of James Hastings

by Christopher Ransom

  I stepped closer. Raised myself on the balls of my feet.

  I spotted a CB radio mounted low on the dash, to the right of the steering wheel. I could see the holstered hand mic attached to the spiral cord.

  And next to that, a cellphone mounted to a plastic cradle. The lid was open, the keypad glowing blue. It would be so simple. Reach in and dial three digits. 9-1-1 . . .

  But I could reach neither the CB nor the phone from the ground. I would have to climb in, lean over the seat.

  I moved closer. I looked back and higher, between the seat backs. A breeze swirled through the cab, returning the aromas of sweat, enchilada sauce, and some kind of disinfectant. It smelled of death.

  The dark porthole between the seats - the window leading back into the bunk - was a rectangle framed in splitting red vinyl, short but wide enough to crawl through.

  A black mouth.

  She was in there. I could feel her in the darkness.

  I saw myself back away one last time, check the view to the road in both directions. I heard myself count to three, saw myself dance forward and scale the rig. Saw my feet mount the running board, the chrome step, my hand finding the steel bar behind the door, and then I was in the cab, my momentum almost pitching me over the driver’s seat as I grabbed for the phone and a scream erupted—

  I saw it all - and my feet never moved.

  I had never stared into such darkness. I might as well have been looking into a mile-deep coffin. To enter would be suicide. I took one step back.

  If he’s not already dead, she’ll kill him and then me. She took out her own brother as if he were a weed in her garden. If the thing inside was ever Stacey, it is no longer. They don’t have names for what she’s become.

  Stop her. You have to stop her.

  I went quickly, my feet sure, climbing, my hand on the wheel. I reached for the phone. I fumbled it from the cradle. My foot slipped and I caught myself, leaning over the seat. The wind was hot on my neck, hot as breath, but I focused on the phone. My thumb found the 9 and for a moment there was no response, not a sound behind me. Maybe they had already abandoned the rig. She could be chasing him into the desert . . .

  I pressed the first 1.

  A thick arm shot through the hole and waved, the fingers clinching above the driver’s seat, grasping. He made no sound and his arm was grub-white.

  I staggered back on my heels and for a moment was suspended, nearly vertical as I balanced, arms waving, the phone slipping from my hand.

  ‘Help,’ his tired voice whispered blindly. ‘Oh, Jesus, help me—’

  His words were cut off and his arm retreated and then he screamed.

  I fell down, tumbling, just gripping the door handle before I reset my feet and landed on the road. I staggered back, my blood freezing in revulsion as the black hole filled with grunts and the hard knocking of a body slamming against a wall. I backed away, never taking my eyes off that open door, and caught my heel. I landed on my ass and my right elbow struck the tarmac, the force of my fear hitting me like a wall, making everything up to my neck tingle.

  Someone screamed, and, while it sounded distinctly feminine, I knew it wasn’t her. The metal side of the cab was shaking, flexing, and then there were no more screams, only a monotonous thudding, rhythmic and direct, the sound of a kid passing a basketball to himself off a gymnasium door. The pounding slowed, halted for nearly half a minute, then finished with a final sickening blow.

  Everything was still.

  I pushed off the ground and tried to stand.

  She swirled out of the darkness, descending cat-like from the swinging door and dropped to the ground, coming for me with blood-soaked hands. There were more spatters of blood on her face and forehead, in her hair. Her shirt was torn open and one of her shoes - some kind of hiker-sneaker thing I didn’t know she had been wearing - was missing. She was calmly striding after me without a word. She wasn’t even breathing hard.

  She stopped three feet away, looming above me. A knife wound some seven to ten inches long gaped white and fatty yellow along her thigh, the blood running down, soaking her socks. Her left eye was swollen shut. A globule of curdled blood and saliva hung from her chin and her teeth were red.

  ‘I fixed it,’ she said. ‘We’re going to Colorado. Everything will be better when we get back to the lake house.’

  For a moment, in my obvious defeat, I thought of going. In the midst of her insanity I glimpsed her logic, the simple clarity of her vision. We would go to the lake house and spend the summer together, in privacy, and I would have another few weeks, perhaps even months, with Stacey. The illusion would be made real. To stay would be suicide, here in the desert, alone. To surrender all will would mean another few hours of warmth, and a lifetime of comfort in the seclusion of my lost mind, all for the low price of my cheaply bargained soul.

  But I also knew she would never leave me alone. Wherever we ended up, she would never leave me in peace. It didn’t even matter if she was Stacey, if Stacey had taken control of her long ago, or if Annette had been obsessed with human masks before she ever laid eyes on Ghost. She was possessed by tragedy and she would invite more; because she had suffered she would thrive on the suffering of others. If it didn’t end here, she would possess me forever.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Get in the truck,’ she said, walking toward me.

  ‘No.’ I got to my feet.

  ‘Get in the truck now, James.’

  ‘You can’t save Aaron,’ I said. She stopped, her eyes full of fury. ‘Aaron’s dead. Just like Stacey. They’re all dead.’

  For a moment the fury was replaced by a broken sadness. ‘You don’t know what you’re saying,’ she said. ‘You’re lost—’

  ‘I don’t love you. I don’t even care about you, Annette, whoever you are. You’re rotten all the way through and you bore me.’

  I turned on the yellow lines and started back for the rest stop.

  ‘James?’ she said. ‘James!’

  I kept walking.

  ‘I’m pregnant, James. That’s why we have to go. We can see it through. At the lake house.’

  I shivered. I kept walking. Up ahead, more than a mile up the highway, headlights crested a hill.

  ‘I’m going to have it,’ she said. ‘It’s what we always wanted, isn’t it?’

  For every step I took, the car moved a hundred feet closer.

  ‘I wanted it to be a surprise,’ she said, her voice closer than it had been a moment ago. She was following me, as Aaron had. ‘This is our chance to make it right. Don’t you want it back? Don’t you want everything you threw away?’

  The car disappeared in a dip, then rose again, the crossbar of lights on top of the roof now visible. It would be the highway patrol. I could almost see his hat, the rounded brim and dented top, like a Mountie’s. The image tapped a new reservoir of energy in me and I began to trot.

  ‘You can’t escape, James,’ she said. Now she was out of breath, running, hurrying. ‘I’ll never let you go!’

  The cruiser’s lights whirled and flashed to life, lighting the road and the desert in every direction. A spotlight trapped us. He slowed and then, as if realizing the urgency of the situation, hammered the throttle. I put my hands up and turned around as the blue cruiser with its white stripe skidded around me.

  The trucker fell screaming from the cab, collapsing on the road behind her, seeming to fold over some kind of metal stock. He was half naked and streaked with blood. She stared at me, pleading as the trucker rolled and got to his knees, his shotgun cocking and then leveling until both barrels were aimed at us.

  He screamed and fired. The flash was a wide, white flame and I fell to the road, legs and arm stinging as the pellets tore into me. Annette’s legs buckled. She swayed on her knees, watching me.

  Howling, the trucker pumped and fired again, twice in rapid succession.

  Annette’s throat opened with a thick spray and her head rocked back, her body arced as if she were a bow and he
had pulled the string. She sagged forward and her face slapped on the road. He lowered the stock, fired again and her body jerked. More shot peppered my ribs and skull. I rolled and covered my head, screaming for him to stop.

  ‘Drop your weapon!’ the patrolman shouted somewhere off to my left. ‘Drop your weapon! Put it down right now!’

  The trucker was in a glory all his own. The shotgun roared again and the patrolman unloaded over the two of us fallen until we were three.

  Half an hour later a long orange Flight for Life helicopter set down on the road. By then there were red flares, horse barricades, ambulances and more state patrol cruisers, and the desert looked like a stadium, the end of a Ghost concert.

  ‘Is she breathing?’ I kept asking them.

  The paramedic who loaded her said, ‘She’s gone into cardiac arrest.’

  ‘She’s pregnant,’ I told him. ‘She told me she was pregnant.’

  He climbed into the chopper and looked back at me as I was being led away in the wheelchair, rolled to the waiting ambulance and police escorts. The paramedic was a blond boy with a good head of hair, but thin and young, and his eyes were old, glossy black, tired beyond words. His expression did not change as he regarded me a moment, then looked down at the bloodied bundle of rags before him. I waited for him to do something more, advance a judgement on us, but none was given.

  The orange helicopter lifted off, billowing curls of road dust and sand, chasing me away, and I watched the machine rise into the black sky until my angel, the angel who had become my demon, was at last absorbed into the glittering heavens.

  aftermath

  This is home. This is where we live. This is where the dead belong.

  If I had gone back to Tulsa, this chronicle of my sanity’s erosion - and its eventual renewal - would never be done. I began after I left the hospital and it took me seven months. When I reached the end I saved the file to my email account and printed a single copy - which I deposited in the storage locker with Stacey’s things over on La Brea, behind a new lock that utilizes a digital code and two keys. Then I did not write another word about my life for two years, and with sound reason, for that which has occupied me since is far more important than writing.

  Three weeks after I finished telling my story, Eddie was born.

  And I’ve got to say, being a single father has its benefits. Women who never used to bat an eye at me at Ralph’s and The Coffee Bean, they suddenly couldn’t get enough of us. We weren’t on the market, though, so we smiled and played along and when we got home we threw their phone numbers away and went about our lives.

  The first few months were hard, with my back surgery, the physical therapy, the blinding headaches that still paralyzed me for hours, the court paperwork, psychiatric evaluations, paternity tests, and all the rest that had consumed my first year. It broke my heart that Eddie had to go it alone in those early weeks that turned into months, a child ward of the state. But my friends on the police department and the lawyers my former employer loaned out helped push things along.

  The first night I brought Edward Michael Hastings home, I took him upstairs to the ballroom, which I had converted into his playroom, and we spread out on the big square of purple shag carpet I had installed over the marble tiles. With my back against the blue bean bag and Eddie on my chest, a bottle of formula cocked in the crook of my arm, I told him the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, because it was the first story my father told to me. He didn’t understand a word of it, but the sound of my voice put him under. And then I stared up at the skylights that had been installed and there must have been a good wind that night, pushing the smog inland, because I could see all the stars as I cried and thanked a God I did not believe in for delivering him to me.

  Eddie’s mother was not required to give permission for the adoption. Eddie has not met his birth mother, and he never will.

  Blaine made a full recovery and Trigger went back to work on Project James with a Texas fire in his belly. He landed me some script work off the hope that I would one day offer up my story to the great crunching content machine, and I didn’t bother to tell him that will never happen. Unless something terrible happens to us. Unless something irreversible and worse than death comes for me and someone were to discover it in the storage locker . . .

  After two years of raising Eddie alone, I needed help. Euvaldo’s niece, Celia, was looking for work. She watched Eddie during the afternoons and sometimes late at night, my two best windows for working. I am no longer an actor, I hope it goes without saying, but the writing thing sort of stuck.

  One night I finished working on a bitch of an action sequence for a script - the pitch was The Fast and the Furious meets Footloose set in the world of rail-car graffitists - and I came out of my office in the sunroom, shocked to realize it was two thirty in the morning. Celia was sleeping on the couch with Eddie spooning against her, a black and white movie flickering over them. She had not interrupted me, even though she was only scheduled weeknights until ten, and watching my son in this woman’s arms filled me with an array of emotions I was not prepared for.

  Gratitude, that there were still good people around to help each other; a gentle but insistent lust, because she wasn’t wearing a bra and this was not the first time that I had noticed the generous swell of her breasts, the downward feathering sweep of little black hairs on the indentation of soft brown flesh covering her tailbone; possession, the certainty that these were my people, my new tribe; and finally the terror of my own heart’s longing, because I did not know if I was allowed to have any of this.

  She did not seem startled to see me there, hovering at the end of the couch. When I offered to take him she only smiled and carried him to the stairs. I followed. Eddie looked over her shoulder, briefly amused to be looking down at me, and then his eyes crossed with sleep and he returned to the land of beanstalks. After she set him in his bed and checked the wire connection on his walkie-talkie, I pulled the covers up and kissed his cheek. As I was leaving the room she caught my hand and without preamble or discussion led me into the master bedroom. As she disrobed, I asked Stacey’s permission.

  Are you at rest now? Are you safe? I tried to tell the truth. I’ll never forget you, you know? Will you let me take another step tonight?

  Before Stacey could answer, Celia kissed me and pressed her body to mine. I traced her curves without comparing them to any others. We slid into bed and she gave herself passionately without taking me too seriously, and it was good both times, all of which happened to be just what I needed.

  She fell asleep in my arms and I could smell my son in her hair.

  The one and only time I visited Annette Salvaggio at the Napa State Hospital, she did not attempt to communicate with me. She had been catatonic for ninety per cent of her waking hours since her apprehension and was deemed unfit to stand trial. The paramedics and surgeons had saved her life, but the scars were a series of scattered white slits up her chest and face, and the hollow of her throat looked like a child’s fork drawing in mashed potatoes. Her hair was cut almost to her skull. She had lost a great deal of weight, rendering her cheeks concave, the brow and eye sockets simian in their stark contrast to the jaundiced skin. Several of the teeth that had been shot out from the back of her head had not been replaced.

  I did not linger, only thanked her for carrying the child to term and wished her ‘some form of recovery and a better existence than this’.

  She stared at me for a long time, her once luminous green eyes now the flat gray of institution filing cabinets. She did not understand a word I had spoken or know who I was, and that was fine. I had not come for her. Though she had been upright, breathing and occasionally scratching her thigh or blinking as she wiped her nose, the event was little more than a casket viewing.

  I don’t have the nightmares any more. I haven’t seen her lifeless eye or Rick’s screaming, blood-dotted face in my dreams since Eddie turned two.

  Ghost resurfaced with a full media blitz announcing
his three-pronged comeback: double album, memoir and the launch of GhostVision, his music and movie channel. He had been ‘on sabbatical’ in Buenos Aires for the past two and a half years, where, according to the press release, he kicked the white horse, became a vegan, wrote more than two hundred songs (and the memoir), and remarried and had a third child with his ex-wife, Drea-Jenna. His only personal acknowledgement of my ordeal was the parting remark on the phone when I called to thank him for the legal resources.

  ‘Way to hang, J. Stay strong and hit me if you’re ever in St Louis.’

  I began this record by stating I hoped he was dead, and in the interests of accurately portraying my feelings at that time I chose not to edit or recant those wishes. But the truth is I was relieved. Having Ghost back at the top of the charts was another sign that the world had not totally slipped its axis, that reality - good old normal fucked up reality - had returned. I took comfort in the fact that the fire we once shared, however tangentially, still burned.