When his breath began to quicken, I backed away on hands and knees, my body hitting a wall. The illusion of having no way out made me panic, and I reached behind me, feeling for a door.
All my movement finally caught Tim’s attention.
When he rounded on me, it was in fast-forward speed, his eyes bulging, his jaw unhinging and lengthening so that it hit the floor.
He roared at me like a mad thing.
I held up a hand to shield myself from the sight, like that’d help me, but I didn’t leave. Not yet.
As he kept roaring, the sound took on a warped, wounded tone, and he began tearing at the air. Even if there was nothing there, blood splattered on the white walls, spraying them with red.
I started screaming as he kept ripping that invisible whatever-it-was apart, blood flying until it was on me, too.
He dropped to the floor, rolling in the crimson, his eyes crazed as he laughed and laughed and bathed himself.
I don’t know where my next idea came from—maybe The Exorcist?—but I began yelling at him with authority.
“You don’t want to hurt anyone, Tim. You’re not going to hurt anyone. Do you understand me? Stop this—now!”
I didn’t know if implanting ideas about nonviolence in his head would do any good, but it made him stop, look at me with curiosity.
“That’s right,” I said, softer now. “You’re calmer now. You’re going to be okay. Just . . . calm down.”
He kept staring, his jaw on the ground, almost animallike in his stillness. He stared long enough so that I started preparing to jump out of the dream.
But before that happened, his mouth unhinged even more, his teeth lengthening, spearing out of his mouth.
Long.
Grotesque.
The points headed right for me.
Instead of screaming, I gave a ferocious yell, dodging the blades, crashing to the floor and closing my eyes and willing myself to—
With a banging pow, I shot out of that white room, bursting out of Tim so forcefully that I flew through his family room toward the wall.
Just before I could hit it, I flexed backward, stopping my motion, then falling to just above the floor, where I paused.
As I recovered, my energy felt way lower but not entirely gone. I was learning to monitor myself so that I’d never be in a time-loop situation again, and when Tim jerked awake on the couch with a strangled yell, I float-crawled over to him.
I wanted to empathize now, to see what he was thinking. I had enough juice in me for that . . .
“Baby?”
Nichelle ran out of the hallway, dressed in a long T-shirt that came to her skinny thighs. “What’s wrong, baby?”
As she swept him into a cradling hug, Tim opened his eyes wide and—
Oh, God, it was the same gaze I’d seen in that dream, when he’d been rolling in the blood. Crazed.
I jetted at him, stopping just in time to touch his face with a forceful hand. But it wasn’t because I intended to empathize.
I made deep contact, entering him again, and since he was awake, I brought up a hallucination, thinking of the fish tank, seeing it through our eyes, making him experience it along with me. . . .
Bobbing in the blue, peace washing through us as we float. There, there, floating, no troubles.
Just water and waves and beauty . . .
I stayed in him awhile, until I was sure the serenity had won him over. And when I eased out of him, he was rag-dolled on the couch, in Nichelle’s arms, breathing deeply as the fish tank behind them burbled. She was shivering at the sudden cold.
Dammit. Well, that had gone spectacularly. I was pretty sure I’d exacerbated Tim’s emotions when he’d seen me in his dream, escalating all his inner demons. Since I was out now, I trusted the hallucination to keep him relaxed.
But who knew how long that would last?
“It was just a bad dream,” Nichelle whispered in his ear while stroking his hair. “Just a bad dream, baby.”
Didn’t I wish.
8
“So what the hell are we going to do?” I asked Amanda Lee in my casita as I braced myself on the car battery, recharging. “If what I saw tonight in that guy’s psyche isn’t a raging warning of bad things to come, I don’t know what is.”
As she merely shook her head, my fellow ghosts who’d gathered here for company seemed just as torn. Louis had one hand in his factory uniform pocket while the other spanned his temples, rubbing. Sailor Randy was faintly bobbing in place. Even Twyla had her hands planted on her petticoat-covered hips.
I’d stayed with Tim and Nichelle through the rest of the night, just to make sure he behaved. She’d taken him to bed and he’d ended up sleeping like a baby, belly-down on the mattress, Nichelle’s hand resting on his back. Peace in the House of Blood. This morning, Tim had left early with some softball gear, and I’d followed him to a field, where I presumed he’d be away from Nichelle for a few hours while playing a game with some coworkers, so things were okay. For now.
Finally, Twyla came up with an answer to the Tim problem.
“Let’s just, like, kill him.”
Everyone but Amanda Lee, who had the fortune of not being able to hear Twyla’s ghost voice very well, gawked at her.
Louis said, “We can’t kill this man.”
Amanda Lee could hear him. “Do you have the power to kill directly?”
“Not that I’m aware of, but even so, there’s got to be another way,” Louis said.
I nodded. “We can protect Nichelle, maybe go into her subconscious and talk to her so she decides to leave Tim before his temper gets really bad . . .”
“Why would Nichelle do that if her friend Heidi can’t even sway her?”
“Because we’d go deeper into her head than Heidi can?” I sighed. “Nichelle just has a way of lighting Tim’s fire awfully close to his fuse. Maybe she’s, literally, Tim’s most perfect match. There’s no fighting that kind of chemistry with two people, even if it’s destructive. There’re times when even smart people don’t listen to what’s good for them.”
Twyla had been pretending to stick her finger down her throat, telling me what she thought of the idea to persuade Nichelle to leave. When she was done, she said, “What about Tim’s next girlfriend? And then, like, the next? Protecting everyone from him isn’t going to happen.”
The whole time, Louis was conveying the discussion to Amanda Lee, who had her eyes closed. And it wasn’t from physical exhaustion. This case was already consuming her.
“Listen,” Twyla said, casually going over to an electrical outlet and making her hand into a slim prong that fit into it. As she negligently stuck it in and charged up, her form flashed with dark Goth and light Lauper. The bulbs around us flickered. “I’ve been a ghostie way longer than Miss Know-It-All Cowabunga Jensen here. So, okay, I party a little. But I also like to spend time watching all the people, you know? I’ve, like, come to the conclusion that there’s some really shitty humans who’re still alive while I’m dead. Randomly, grodily dead. Slain-by-a-hair-dryer dead. And this killer-in-the-making gets to live while I died early? Whatever.”
Louis stopped translating to Amanda Lee. Gently, he said, “Twyla, you don’t get to play judge and jury. It’s not the place for any of us.”
I wanted to ask if he’d wished that there’d been ghost judges and juries while he’d been alive about seventy years ago, having to exist under a system that had valued his life less than others just because of the way he’d been born.
Twyla said, “You know what is awesome about being dead? Not having parental units around to boss me.”
She stuck her tongue out at Louis and he made a very clear effort not to roll his eyes.
I didn’t have the strength to care about ghost bickering. Tim’s dream had really shaken me. There’s nothing like seeing someone rolling in blood to convince you there’s something wrong with them. Then there was my own history with violence, which only added to the creep factor.
“We need to do something,” I said. “Just leaving this alone won’t work. If something happens to Nichelle, there’ll be blood on our hands.”
Twyla continued charging up in her corner. “I totally think he’d be better off dead. That’s all.”
Randy finally interjected. “Y’all’ve heard that thing ’bout Hitler, right?”
At first, we just looked at him like he should’ve just said no to drugs. But such an off-base remark could’ve been the eternal booze in him.
He continued, “It’s that ol’ chestnut: If ya could go back in time, before Hitler’s in power, would ya kill ’im?”
Louis said, “It’s a valid question. Would you commit murder to save the eleven million lives that were taken during the Holocaust?”
The Brain speaks. Louis had been a college-educated man who’d worked at a bayside aircraft plant during World War II after they’d exhausted the pool of white workers here. But as a ghost, he’d spent nearly a half century reading over peoples’ shoulders in the library.
“Yeah,” Randy said. “What Louis said.”
Louis continued. “I realize we’re not talking about those kinds of numbers with Tim, but there’s bad in the boy for certain. We just don’t have the benefit of hindsight with him.”
“I saw a possible future,” I said.
“A possible one.” Louis scrubbed a hand over his dark hair, then down over his face.
Amanda Lee watched his moral dilemma with understanding. “When I told my PI friend Ruben about Tim, he agreed that we’re dealing with an antisocial person, even before we knew about what is in Tim’s subconscious.” She exhaled. “Although I’m being cautious because of what happened when I presumed Gavin Edgett guilty, all my instincts are telling me that it’s only a matter of time before Tim becomes trouble.”
“So,” Twyla said, “the easiest way is to kill him . . . indirectly.”
Randy flew to her side. “What’f he jus’ happened to see ’n image of a woman in a bathin’ suit, ’n’ she was jus’ off the edge of a cliff. He sees her, makes a run for her, off the cliff he goes ’n’—”
“Bye-bye, psycho!” Twyla said.
I think she was about to high-five Randy like Lauper would’ve done with Captain Lou Albano, but Louis’ voice put a stop to it.
“There’s no glee in this.”
Amanda Lee was looking in the direction of his voice. “I vote that we think about everything more before we make any kind of move. In the meantime, if we have any volunteers, we need to ghost watch in a few different places.”
I took it up from here. “Right. Scott’s at Wendy’s right now, so—”
Louis raised a hand. “I’ll keep an eye on Tim.”
Thank goodness a moron like Twyla hadn’t volunteered for that. She looked glum that Louis had spoken first, though.
“Gawd,” she said. “What does that leave me with?”
“Amanda Lee could still use someone to fend off the lookiloos and keep an eye out for that dark spirit if it decides to come visit her.” I’d almost forgotten about that issue because of all the crapola that’d been hitting us.
“Boooring,” she muttered.
“Thank you for your willingness, Twyla,” I said to spare Amanda Lee’s feelings. But from the way the older woman was smiling wryly, I’d bet she knew Twyla wasn’t exactly hot to trot for this task.
“Randy,” I said. “Could you keep watch on Flaherty’s Pub downtown? It seems Gavin Edgett has been taking little trips there to talk with my friend Suze about me.”
“Pub? Well, sure.”
As Randy was nodding with enthusiasm about his task, Amanda Lee said to me, “You never did get to tell us if there was anything Suze knew about your missing bracelets.”
“I read her thoughts, and she revealed that she saw Brittany Kirkman Stokley wearing them.”
“I wrote down her address, as well as Lisa Levine’s, from Ruben’s notes, just in case you would like to pay a visit.”
“The psychic strikes again,” I said.
Twyla was back on the Suze part. “So Gavin Edgett’s been tiptoeing off to this bar, huh? Trying to get Jensen’s old best friend to spill info about her. How kink.”
“What does that even mean?” I asked. “Kink.”
“He totally has, like, an obsession for you. That’s kink. I bet the attention feels rad.”
Ignore.
I addressed Randy. “Can you listen in on any conversations he and Suze might have, if he shows up there again?”
“Yes, indeedy.”
“But, Randy,” Twyla added, “you must remember that Jen-Jen doesn’t want her boyfriend to get too close to any other girls, even her old bud. She wants him.”
“Bag it, Twyla.”
“Bag you.”
She’d hit a mark in me, and I didn’t want her to hit another one. I kept telling myself that I didn’t need Suze involved with any of this. Even though Gavin was innocent of Elizabeth Dalton’s killing—he’d been her fiancé and we’d thought he’d murdered her in a jealous rage—he’d still killed his father when he’d found out that the old man had been abusing Farah years ago and was about to start with his adopted, oblivious daughter Wendy.
Was I feeling protective of Suze just because I didn’t want her with someone capable of that? Or was there more?
Twyla unplugged herself from the socket. “I’m going to invite Cassie to hang around during my slog here.” She sneered at Amanda Lee. “That way I won’t go bonkers in Boresville.”
“You do that,” I said. Cassie was a seventies housewife, a maternal influence on Twyla. I couldn’t argue with the arrangement.
Louis had finished translating for Amanda Lee, and he looked at everyone. “I suppose when it rains, it pours.”
Randy bounced around. “I like the activity.”
I realized that I sort of did, too. The more I had to do, the more . . . well, alive I felt. The extra electricity running through me these days wasn’t exactly like being human, but it was close enough.
Louis had something else to say as he fixed his attention on me. “Are you going to tell us the details of Tim’s dream? You weren’t too specific.”
Oh, how Louis loved this part. He was a regular Freud. So, as the ghosts gathered around me like kids at story time, I launched into the dream details for everyone’s consumption: the basement, the furnace, the sunbather on the TV who’d changed into Heidi, and the voices coming from the walls. How the TV had turned into a horror movie in the woods and then the white room with the bloodbath . . .
I shivered, my essence crackling. “Tim’s dream wasn’t as creative as Gavin’s were, but it was vivid enough.”
Amanda Lee said, “Gavin is a video game designer, so that only makes sense. Instead of having fantasy landscapes, our workingman, Tim, has a basement.”
“The most basic representation of the subconscious,” Louis said. “Very primal.”
“Thanks, Sigmund,” said Twyla. “What about those toys Jen-Jen saw?”
“Sometimes the subconscious stores the things we’ve put away,” Louis said.
Amanda Lee was frowning. “Something Ruben told me yesterday reminds me . . . He said that a great deal of violent, deviant behavior is rooted in an abusive childhood—physical, verbal, or emotional. The broken toys make me think . . .”
“That Tim’s mom literally stuck him in a basement sometimes?” I asked. “God. I mean, the mom’s voice was coming from the walls, and she was saying demeaning things to Tim down there. What if that’s where she took him when he was being punished, and all he could do was play with toys, look out the window, or watch TV?”
“Maybe that’s too literal,” Amanda Lee said.
“Maybe,” Louis said, “we’re dealing with a fairly literal man.”
Randy got in there. “Broke toys. Is that—?”
“Duh,” Twyla said. “It totally means a bad childhood. The toys were in a leaning pile that’s about to fall over, so double duh. He had an un
stable time as a kid.”
Not bad, I thought.
“Duh yourself,” Randy said, floating toward the computer, which had been on the whole time. He manipulated it, surfing the Web as the screen went a bit snowy. “I can guess jus’ what that furnace means.”
“It’s a seething monster of doom,” Twyla said, getting cocky. She joined him at the computer.
“No.” Randy peered through the screen interference. “This Web shite says a furnace is power ’n’ energy. Duh.”
I couldn’t take it anymore. “Ix-nay the duhs!”
Randy and Twyla both smiled cheekily at me, shrugged at each other, then started whispering about what they were finding on the site.
I got back on track, turning to Louis and Amanda Lee. “I think it’s pretty obvious what was going on with Nichelle’s voice taking over for his mom’s.”
“From one dominant woman to another,” Amanda Lee said. “He feels as if he’s still in that basement, but it’s with Nichelle. She’s the one who puts him there now, mentally and emotionally.”
“But he stays in a relationship with Nichelle,” Louis said. “Why would he do that?”
“Because he has a need to control her,” I said, “and he’s going to try until he finally gets it right. It’s a catch-22 for him. A vicious cycle.”
“Why does she stay with him?” Louis asked again.
“I think, even though she doesn’t have much self-esteem, she might like to wear the pants,” I said. “She seems pretty dominant in a passive-aggressive way.”
Amanda Lee spoke. “It would seem so. As far as Tim goes, though, he’s not able to succeed in what he needs, so he’s frustrated and angry. That’s what you saw when the walls turned white and he was ripping apart that invisible something in his hands, spattering everything with blood.”
“Bad tidings,” I said.
“Oh-my-ga-od!” Twyla, back at the computer. “Farting is in the dream dictionary!”
Randy was laughing as he said, “It means yer passive-aggressive and need to ’xpress yourself ’n a more direct manner! I don’t know what passive-aggressive means, but thass funny.”
Ghost ADD. I’m telling you.
Another One Bites the Dust Page 10
