by Ed Gorman
The voice.
He listened . . . hard . . . long . . .
But it did not come again.
When he was back in bed, "Ms. Tree" starting to wrap up her case, it suddenly occurred to him why the voice might come to him.
He smiled at himself.
Sometimes he really was slow.
It was because of the little book he'd discovered in the basement of the cabin here a few months back.
What did you call those books?
Oh, yes: diaries.
That was what the voice wanted: for him to give back the diary he'd found.
In all the years he'd been coming here to the cabin, he'd never once taken anything. Not once.
Until, that is, he'd found the book which presently resided at home under his bed. Now, he supposed, he'd better bring the book back or the voice was going to be very angry.
It wouldn't be like the first time he'd heard the voice when it was strange and beautiful as the gas-blue firefly.
No, just from the brief muttering of the voice he'd heard while reading "Ms. Tree," he knew that the voice was displeased with him.
He kept thinking about this as he read. And the cabin windows filled with blackness and the rain continued to thrum on the roof.
He read until he was so drowsy he couldn't even hold up the comic book, until it fell across his chest and he just couldn't keep his eyes open any longer, until he fell fast asleep, as if he'd been pushed off a cliff into some bottomless crevice.
Just before he dropped off completely, he began to dream of what it would be like tonight with Bethel. . . He had seen her undress one night, watching her longingly and lovingly, so crazed with his desire that he literally began banging his head against a tree, the bark of it leaving indentations in his forehead. When he got home, his parents looked at him suspiciously, as if he'd gotten into one of his rare fights or something . . .
All he could think of was Bethel's bountiful chest and the way he both desired and feared her . . .
6
Because they weren't sure of her exact condition, they checked on her frequently.
Sometimes it was a female nurse, sometimes a male.
Sometimes it was a doctor with gray at his temples; other times it was just an orderly who looked all twitchy to get to the club later on in the evening.
To all of them she presented the same kind of face: blank.
They had tried, of course, to brighten her white room with red long-stemmed roses and some new baby-blue pajamas and a flowing yellow robe with nubby buttons and slippers of felt the color of autumn leaves.
But none of this made any impression on her as she sat there staring straight ahead, seemingly at nothing.
Her eyes did not move from left to right, or up or down, or even flicker with any sort of interest.
Around four-thirty that afternoon, when "The Flinstones" was on Jamie's TV set, a plump, pleasant nurse came in with a box of Brach's chocolates. She went up to Jamie, held out the chocolates, and said, "Here, honey, why don't you take these? They'll make you feel better."
It happened with no warning whatsoever.
Jamie turned around in the bed, grabbed the box of chocolates, and crushed them in a grasp so tight that all the nurse could do was watch, more fascinated than horrified.
Jamie twisted the package into a shape that resembled scrap metal, then hurled it across the room.
Then she reached up, her eyes in an unimaginable rage, and got hold of the fat nurse's neck.
In moments Jamie had the plump, white-dressed nurse against the wall, the woman's face ugly with blood filling her cheeks. The woman tried to kick out at Jamie but it did no good.
Sweat poured down Jamie's face, she pressed her hands so hard against the nurse's throat. Jamie trembled as she continued the pressure on the woman. A kind of cry escaped her throat which only seemed to make the woman more frightened than before.
Then Jamie put her teeth into the woman's forehead and ripped off a piece of skin.
Now it was the nurse's turn to shriek as she saw a patch of her own bloody flesh between Jamie's teeth.
Then the two burly orderlies came rushing in . . .
She lay in bed with her blue eyes wide open, a pretty girl, in a freckle-faced tomboyish way.
Occasionally the voice told her once again about the beautiful yellow flowers and about the cabin and about certain things that needed to be done.
Jamie lay in her bed with her eyes wide open, wishing it were full night so she could get out of there and get on with the things the voice told her about.
She waited . . .
CHAPTER TWELVE
1
Sally stood at the window of her hotel watching the storm gather in the north.
After leaving David Hanratty, she had tried to sleep, but all she could manage was a kind of fitful dozing reminiscent of those days immediately following the death of her husband. When the mind was consumed with a single thought, sleep was no escape, for the thought was as wide and deep as eternity itself.
She thought of how, just yesterday in the sunny afternoon, the town of Haversham had looked so charming, with all its old automobiles., its park benches set on street corners for old folks to sit on . . .
But now the town was ugly in its age, decayed as a corpse left to rot. Now she saw the rust on the cars and the scars on the park benches and the shabby mock-heroic statuary in the town square.
Her eyes fell to the sidewalk where, less than twenty-four hours ago, she and her daughter had stood looking over at the Royal Hotel.
Something had troubled Jamie about this place, and now, of course, Sally blamed herself for not having been more sensitive.
Jamie was not a kid given to hysteria, and she should have been a more attentive mother . . .
The tears came again, though this time there were fewer; she was getting cried out. She stood and watched the clouds and tried to pray, but she was too exhausted and afraid to formulate anything resembling a worthy plea to whatever forces roamed and shaped the universe.
Then the phone rang.
At first she stared at it as if it were an alien machine whose purpose she did not understand.
After several rings, loud and echoing in the aged and faded room, she went to it and lifted the receiver.
"Hi."
She knew instantly who it was.
"Hello," she said.
There was a pause. She could feel his pain in the silence. "I don't know what to say."
"I know."
"I want to help you but I don't know how."
Now it was her turn to be silent for a time. She touched long fingers over her heart and felt its faint fluttering. The gesture reminded her of a favorite maiden aunt who used to touch her heart in just that, way—not until this moment had Sally realized that she had picked up the same habit. "It would help if you'd talk to me, I suppose."
"All right."
She paused again. "What I'm trying to say is that I need you to tell me all about your daughter Anne. Everything that happened."
"I'll be glad to." But the pain was back in his voice.
"A man named Hanratty contacted me."
"Ah, yes, Hanratty."
"You know him."
"Know of him. He's been staying across the street observing our hotel. And all the time Ron Evars has been observing him. From what I gather, he's investigating the killings here."
"Yes."
"I suppose he's even interested in the Malcolm case."
"She was the woman who killed the man in 1947?"
"That's what I need to know. I don't know if it will help, but. . ."
The silence again.
Finally, he said, "I need to say something and I need you to understand it in exactly the way I mean it. All right?"
"I'll try. I promise."
"Last night when we—" He obviously searched for the right words. "When we spent those hours together—I didn't think I could ever be that happy again. I know this
isn't the right time to bring that up. . . "
"No—no, it's exactly the right time. It means I have a friend: you. And I need a friend very badly."
"Carlotta fixed a ham dinner, complete with her own pineapple sauce. It's one of her specialties. How does that sound?"
"Wonderful."
"Fine. Why don't you come down in half an hour."
"All right."
She hung up the telephone.
2
Gonzalez sat in a small white room across from the young girl in the white hospital gown. She also wore a white straightjacket.
On his lap he held a clipboard on which he had planned to write. In twenty minutes he had written nothing. Mostly he just watched the girl.
He asked, "Who is Anne?"
Jamie said nothing. Even though it was no more than sixty-three degrees in the room, she was sweating a great deal.
"Who is Anne?" he asked again.
She turned her head slightly to him so that he could see her eyes
Still she said nothing.
"After you bit the nurse and the orderlies came in, you started screaming about somebody named Anne." He paused. "I'm trying to help you, Jamie. Maybe you could tell me who Anne is."
"Anne is my friend."
She said it very clearly and simply. In the empty white room, her words had the cadence of a very theatrical statement. Yet it hadn't been theatrical at all, merely the almost sweet expression of a thirteen-year-old girl.
"Is she a nice friend?"
"Yes."
He paused again, not quite sure what to say.
"Would you tell me some things about her?"
Jamie slipped back into her silence.
Gonzalez picked up his clipboard and took a pen from the pocket of his white jacket. He wrote the single word "Anne" on the ruled paper.
He looked up at Jamie again. "Would you tell me a few things about her?"
"She's my friend."
"I know, Jamie," he said patiently. "But I mean a few more things. Specific things."
"She's younger than me."
"How old is she?"
"Twelve."
"Where does she live?"
"Here."
"In the hospital?"
"No. In Haversham."
Gonzalez said, "So you've actually seen her?"
"Seen Anne?"
"Yes."
"Sure I have. This afternoon."
The more she talked, the more relaxed she sounded, almost as if they were having a conversation over Pepsis about the latest rock stars.
He looked at her in the white gown, at her freckles and cute pink lips, and he felt a terrible grief for her.
They were sitting here talking about a friend of hers who had been dead for several years now, a friend she said she had seen today. Gonzalez was filled again with the awe of his medical school days—awe that the human mind could be so complex and, ultimately, so unknowable.
"What did you talk about?"
"Me and Anne, you mean?"
"Yes."
For the first time her eyes averted his. "Why do I have to wear this thing?"
He smiled. "It isn't much fun, is it?"
"A while ago you frightened several people, including me when you attacked the nurse"
He had expected some kind of explanation but she simply stared at the floor and said, in a whisper, "Oh."
"Do you remember attacking the nurse?"
"Yes."
"Do you know why you did it?"
Once again she slipped into silence.
He went back to his earlier question. "What did you and Anne talk about?"
She lifted her head again. "I told you. Things."
"What kinds of things?"
"She told me about yellow flowers."
"Yellow flowers?"
"She said there's a beautiful place by the river where there are hundreds of yellow flowers. She said she'd take me there."
"Did she say when?"
"No."
He looked at her levelly. "Did Anne tell you to attack the nurse?"
Silence.
He said, "Jamie, I need to know what kind of friend Anne is."
"I told you. A good friend."
"Good friends don't ask you to do bad things."
"The nurse was bad. Not Anne."
"How was the nurse bad?"
"Anne didn't like her."
"Why didn't Anne like her?"
"Because the nurse believes bad things about Anne."
"What bad things?"
"Things that aren't true. That people say."
"What bad things?" he repeated.
She put her eyes down.
"I don't want to talk anymore."
He could see she was tired, sensed that any further conversation at this point would be hopeless.
He stood up and said, "I've got a surprise for you."
"What?"
"I'm going to tell the orderlies to take off the straightjacket."
He had expected at least some small expression of happiness over this, but—nothing.
He walked across the steps separating them, put his hand on her shoulder, and said, "You know something, Jamie?"
"What?"
"I want to be your friend, too; I really do."
But again she showed no signs of pleasure, just looked young and ruined sitting there in the coarse binding of the straightjacket and the bright patches of freckles on her cute face.
He went over to the intercom and had the orderlies come in.
When he got back to his office, tired and wishing only for a roast beef sandwich, a bottle of Miller Lite, and a Cubs game on cable, he found somebody waiting for him . . . somebody he vaguely recognized without being able to say why. The man put out his hand.
"Hello, Dr. Gonzalez. My name is David Hanratty. I'm a writer. I wonder if we could talk for a few minutes."
Gonzalez was intrigued by the fact that the man was a writer. "Sure. As long as we can do it over a beer somewhere."
3
"She was a very normal little girl," Carleton Edmonds was telling Sally Baines an hour later. They sat in the hotel's formal dining room, at the western end of a beautiful mahogany table that seemed to Sally the length of a football field.
Two silver candles fluttered in the rain-gloomed room, casting shadows that played like phantoms on the flocked golden wallpaper.
Before them sat the remains of their dinner. Secretly Sally had been expecting a rather plain meal, but instead, Carlotta's cooking had proved to be wonderful.
"Then it happened."
His words had the effect of a verbal suicide note. His pain hinted of a kind of madness. "That night, I mean."
"Yes," she whispered, "yes, that night," referring, of course, to her own night and that of her daughter.
He went on from there.
On that evening in 1996, Carleton Edmonds had played three holes of dusk golf with a pharmacist friend of his: come home and watched "Law and Order," discussed the upcoming Democratic convention; and then gone to the special suite that he and his wife lived in on the third floor of the hotel.
At two A.M. he was awakened by a terrible shrieking. His first fear had been for his wife. He reached out for her but she wasn't there.
Then he ran down the hall to his daughter Anne's room.
And that's when he saw the first one.
He had seen drunks pass out before in the hallways of hotels—but there was something different about this man.
He was slumped over in such a way that Carleton could see what had happened to his neck—it had been severed, his head only resting on his shoulder. His left arm had been hacked away. Blood poured from the stump. Carleton walked in blood so deep it seeped into his shoes. He rushed on down the hallway.
When he reached Anne's room, he threw back the door and ran inside and saw her standing there silhouetted against the window in the moonlight.
An ax dripping blood and brains and entrails was clenched tigh
tly in her hands and held up high, as if she were a soldier holding a weapon at attention.
Then he saw his wife's body lying across the bed. A hand ax stuck up from her forehead, its handle curved in the pale illumination from the window. Her right forearm had been cleaved off at the elbow and now lay on the edge of the bed, seeming to beckon to him.
Crazed, Carleton started toward his daughter, but she raised the weapon and he had no doubt that she would kill him if she could.
And then the man crawled into the room.
Carleton recognized the man's screaming—he'd been the one who'd awakened Carleton.
The man crawled for a simple reason. She had cut off one of his legs at the knee. She had also taken off his left hand.
He was delirious.
He reached Carleton and clung to him, pouring blood and spewing curses, and Carleton looked down at the poor man so completely horrified that he was paralyzed.
And then Anne started chopping at the man again.
She crossed the room and, still in silhouette, brought the ax down and up, down and up, with the authority of someone much bigger and older.
She got the man's face, ripping off his nose, smashing his head so violently that one of his eyeballs escaped his face as if it had been propelled.
And all Carleton could do was watch.
It took him nearly half an hour to describe the details of that night. When he was finished, he said, "Then they took her to the hospital and she never came back." He shook his head. "But of course they didn't believe the truth."
"Which is?" Sally said softly.
He sighed. "I don't see why I should waste your time with it, really, Sally. I know it's farfetched, and who knows—maybe I'm just what they say, a distraught father looking for any way to clear his daughter's name."
"In other words, you think she was possessed?"
Without hesitation, he answered, "Absolutely."
The next part of his story concerned 1947 and a woman named Barbara Evans, a very genteel prostitute who worked out of the Royal Hotel with very few people knowing the truth, including Carleton's grandfather, who thought she was simply a weekly guest—until one night when a sales convention came to the Royal.
