Mothership

by Bill Campbell

  “Well, at least they had the decency to put in an exercise room, Riley. And a spa.”

  “Let’s go, man. I’m ‘bout to have a Nat Turner moment.”

  We wind westward through the side streets. I’m blending with the bums, a limping weirdo in a long leather jacket, talking and joking like there’s some dude next to me. No one pays me much mind; strolling madmen are an endangered species in this part of town.

  “Black people live here?” Riley says as we approach the first spiraling mansion. It’s a holdout: Several of the richest black families got together and bought up all the property on this one block as a last ditch effort to hold on to the old spirit of West Harlem. “Shit, if I’d known that when I was alive I would’ve found a reason to come over and marry their daughter. This place is made outta money.”

  “Maybe you did,” I say. “Hell, maybe you lived here.”

  “Carlos, I don’t have to remember my past to know that this brother was broke, okay? Don’t press me on it.”

  “I don’t really see how …” I start, but then the door swings open and a tuxedoed white man appears.

  “No … fucking … way!” Riley yells at the top of his lungs.

  The butler can only see and hear me though, and he doesn’t look amused. “How may I help you, sir?”

  “These negroes went ahead and got a white man to serve them hand and foot!” Riley gasps, doubled over with laughter. “Son!”

  “I’m Agent Delacruz with the NYPD’s Special Crimes Division.” I flash a fake badge that the Council of the Dead secured through one of their nefarious, un-talked-about connections with the cops. “Just want to ask Mister and Missus Ballantine a few questions about the disappearance of their son.” It’s utter nonsense of course but usually gets us in the door.

  “The Ballantines have already spoken to the police,” the butler says in a severe monotone. “They don’t wish to be further disturbed.”

  Riley stops laughing. “Oh really, motherfucker?”

  “I understand, sir,” I say, “however, I’m afraid I have to insist. Given the recent media coverage about the number of kids gone missing on this block, it’s crucial that we rule them out once and for all as suspects in the investigation.”

  The butler raises an eyebrow. I really haven’t said anything, just laced the words “media” and “suspects” into a sentence together so Jeeves’ll know I mean business. He chortles unintelligibly, opens the door and stands to the side. I walk in, exaggerating my hobble. I don’t feel any imminent danger, but I’ve fallen into the habit of giving anyone I meet plenty of reasons to underestimate me.

  A few minutes later, Riley and I are waiting in an eerily immaculate sitting room. Nothing around us looks like it’s supposed to be touched. The air is acrid with cleaning solution and perfume, so I light a cigar and blow some smoke toward Riley.

  “This place is icky,” my partner says, flowing over a pristine forest of crystal tchotchkes. “Let’s do what we gotta do and blow on to the next one.” I nod slightly instead of answering, because I know someone somewhere is monitoring our every sniff and tremble on little black and white screens.

  Mr. John R. Ballantine looks rather ghostlike himself when he shows up. His thin face creases into a perma-frown that radiates over his entire body. “I’ve already said all I need to say to the police,” he says without leaving the doorway. “All I’ve gotten in return is stupidity and bureaucracy, none of which will bring back my boy. You can show yourself out.”

  “Sir,” I say, but he simply walks away. Riley and I exchange a look and then I walk out and he floats to the corridor that Mr. Ballantine disappears into.

  Outside, the block is completely still. Even the breeze is keeping its distance out of respect to the grieving. It’s the end of summer, and the late afternoon sun plays a dazzling light show across the Hudson River. If I’d been able to touch Ballantine, I would’ve had a chance to penetrate his wall of grief and find something out, but the man was unapproachable. I close my eyes and take a long pull of smoke. The sorrow must be seeping from house to house like a biohazard, making families keep their children locked up in crisp air-conditioned bedrooms, throwing silence over dinner tables, wreaking havoc on fragile, middle-aged sex lives. Or was that how things were even without a spate of child-killings?

  “It’s the third house on the left,” Riley says, breaking my reverie. “Some dude named Calhoun. New on the block.”

  “What about him?”

  “I dunno, but sounds like everyone thinks he’s to blame for all this. Let’s take a look.”

  The Calhoun estate is every bit as magnificent as the rest of the block. Spiraling towers poke out above a terrace garden. This time we’re ready when a white man comes to the door. “Could you tell Mr. Calhoun that the NYPD would like a word with him?” I say in my formal let’s-get-this-done voice.

  “You’re talking to him,” the white guy says with a grin. Yes, the Hawaiian shirt and khaki shorts should’ve tipped me off that he wasn’t the butler, but the whole day has thrown me for a loop. John Calhoun’s in his mid-forties and sports a quickly retreating flop of light brown hair.

  “Right, Mr. Calhoun.”

  “John,” the guy says.

  “John,” I say. “You’re ….”

  “Can I help you?” A touch of menace flickers around Mr. Calhoun. Riley catches it too. I get my game together and give him my cop spiel. He sizes me up for a moment and then flashes a cheesy smile and beckons me inside.

  “Really horrible stuff, all this business with the young black kids dying and all,” our host says as he leads us through an expansive foyer toward some glass-paneled sliding doors. I believe him—there’s no anxiousness or guilt radiating out, and his voice is slightly detached but not forced.

  My eyes dart across the room and Riley does a flash fly around. It’s hard to describe what we look for in situations like this. Something that’s not right, is the best way I can put it; something that may be harboring a malicious spirit or used to commit mass murder. But that could be anything. I’ve extracted some vengeful afterlifers from an old boot and executed a whole nest of errant house ghosts that were infesting a microwave. You have to learn to pick up on the little clues that things are not as they should be; tiny cries for help. Then there’s the obvious ones, like the dried up animal parts that some bored traveler dragged home thinking they’d look cute on the mantle, or the blatantly haunted grandfather clock that shows whoever’s near how they’re going to die. Those are the ones that make you roll your eyes and try not to think about how the fool deserves whatever supernatural ass-whupping he ends up getting.

  John Calhoun has none of that stuff though, at least not on the first two floors. He leads me up a winding stairwell, all the while chatting about the different families and how welcoming they were when he moved into the neighborhood and what a terrible shame it is about those black kids. We pause on a landing and I say: “Mr. Calhoun.”

  “Please,” throwing his hands up, “just John.”

  “John, you are white, correct?”

  Calhoun lets out a laugh like I’d just told a dirty joke. I half-chuckle, more out of discomfort than anything else. From somewhere above us, I hear Riley squirming and clattering around. “I mean,” Calhoun says, acting like he’s still reeling from the preposterousness of the question. He makes a show of checking the skin on his arm. “I am!” he says, still yukking away. “By golly!”

  “Is this guy for real?” Riley says, floating down next to me. I shake my head back and forth, at a loss for words.

  “How is it you came to live on the last remaining all black block in West Harlem, Mr. Calhoun?” I say. I really am curious.

  “What is this, the 1960s?” Calhoun laughs. “Did I break a zoning law? Are you going to charge me with desegregation? Guilty as charged.” I just stare at him. “Okay, look, in all seriousness,” he says, wiping the big grin off his face and waxing professorial, “I have a great respect for African and African
-American culture. I teach Pan-African history at Columbia. I’ve written several books on Nigerian culture and the Caribbean Diaspora. I’ve spent three of the past seven years doing field-work on one end of the continent or the other. I wasn’t about to move into some hood, but I feel comfortable around black people. So here I am. I asked permission from the block council before buying the place, and frankly they were quite impressed with my extensive knowledge of pre-Colombian civilizations.”

  “Let’s kill him,” Riley says in my ear.

  “Now, Detective,” Calhoun finishes triumphantly, “if you will kindly step into my office, we can further discuss the tragedy at hand.”

  Riley and I both stop and let our jaws hang open. An entire army of sacred African masks and statues clutter around us from every corner and crevice. I recognize a few from the Afrofantastic table stores on 125th, but most of it’s clearly some collector shit. A small cadre of cowry shell-eyed stone heads gape up at me from the floor around Calhoun’s writing desk. Wooden Masai warriors guard either side of his file cabinets. Elaborate masks glare from the walls. Any number of these items could be covertly housing some irritable, child-killing demon. The air’s thick with old wood musk, Calhoun’s self-satisfaction and a chaotic mix of colliding spiritual energies. None of them jump out at me as being particularly malevolent, but there’s still plenty to sort through.

  “What’s the matter?” Calhoun jibes. “Never been in a room with so many sacred objects at once? It is a little overwhelming at first, but you get used to it.” Somewhere in the clutter of masks, digital fish float lazily across a screensaver.

  “Did any of the kids from the neighborhood ever come up here?” I ask.

  “Do you have any idea how valuable just one of these items is, Detective?”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  John Calhoun smiles. “No, Detective, none of the children ever came up to this room. I have had a couple of the families over for dinner in the past few months since I moved in, the Robinsons, the Eltons and the Ballantines, and I suppose I showed the adults my collection—I’m a bit of a showoff—but none of the kids came up that I recall.”

  Riley’s milling in and out of the statues, trying to untangle all the spiritual data colliding around us. Judging from his cursing, he’s not having much luck. “The last officers I spoke to told me I wasn’t a suspect,” Calhoun says as he walks past me and holds the door open. Then I feel it: A wash of brittle frustration and rage. The suddenness of it almost knocks me into a battalion of statues. “Whoa there, guy!” Calhoun says, reaching out good naturedly as I right myself. “Told you it was a little overwhelming at first. Why don’t you have a seat in my thinking chair?”

  I don’t like the sound of that at all, but the nausea’s so intense I don’t have much choice. I slump into an antique wooden chair with ornate pink cushions. Of course Calhoun would be one of these doofy intellectuals that needs his special chair to get anything done. If anything though, sitting makes the spiritual cringing even more fierce, like two giant sets of teeth grating somewhere at the core of my being. I leap up out of the chair and walk unsteadily to the door.

  “Detective!” Calhoun calls after me, but I’m already making my way back out into the fresh early evening air.

  “What you think?” I ask Riley as we stroll the Hudson River walkway.

  “I think we have a problem.” Shadows grow long around us. The water turns a murky purple beneath the graying sky. “There’s definitely something up there but there’s too many statues and masks to sort through.”

  “You felt it, right?”

  “Yeah,” Riley says. “Powerful shit. Like a caged animal or something. I know one thing: I never seen your ass move out of a room that fast.” We both have a good laugh. “What’d you get from Calhoun?”

  “The guy’s all kindsa trapped in his head. He’s got this lingering discomfort though—”

  “Another shocking discovery by Carlos.”

  “No, I mean there’s something else. When that festering rage passed through the room, it didn’t come from him, but it knew him. Or he knew it. Something. There was a familiarity between them.”

  “Maybe,” Riley says, “he paid some charlatan to spiritually bind him to one of those masks and the shit worked.”

  “There’s definitely something he’s not being straight about.”

  Riley’s nebular glowing body straightens suddenly. He’s getting a message from the Council of the Dead.

  “Those telepathic motherfuckers want an update and an answer ASAP,” he reports.

  “Imma do a little archive work,” I say. “But we need some time in that room without Dr. Africa’s prying ass around.”

  Riley nods. “Tonight.”

  The basement research section at the Harlem Public Library is incongruously tidy. It lacks the towering stacks of coffee stained parchment one would hope for in a historical archive, and the antiseptic smell and glaring lights would better suit a hospital. But that’s only if you stay in the main reading room. If you down with Doctor Tennessee though, you don’t stay in the reading room, you go into the backstacks. “The reading room for suckas,” Doctor Tennessee told me when I first came through for a visit. “The backstacks where all the good shit hiding. If you workin’ anything deeper than a middle school book report ….” She peered over her bifocals at me to confirm. I was trying to track down an angry architect ghost at the time, so I nodded. “… Well then you gonna need to go into the backstacks. You smoke?”

  “Cigars.”

  “Gimme one.” The little doctor ambled quickly down a corridor and around a corner. A second later she poked her head out and waved at me. “Well, c’mon then, mister. Ain’t you gonna join me?” I looked around the crisp, sterile reading room and then ducked under the counter and followed the old woman out the door. That was the first of many, many afternoons spent sharing smokes and jokes in the little hidden atrium between the main library and the backstacks. Mostly I just let Tennessee talk, rambling stories about her childhood outside of Memphis mixed in with animal fables, historical anecdotes and musings on the history of jazz. Then I make my request.

  “Calhoun,” I say. The good doctor has wound down and is now sitting peacefully, sending little smoke cities up along the gray bricolage of air ducts and fire escapes.

  “John Calhoun?” She spits back at me. For all the spiraling stacks in the labyrinth surrounding us—there is an even larger library inside the doctor’s head.

  “The very same.”

  “The cat that wrote all the books ’bout Africa or his plantation owning great grand-pappy?”

  “Come again?”

  “John Richard Calhoun III is a preeminent scholar of West African culture and religion. You can’t draw a smiley face on a paper plate in Benin without the guy writing a book about it. Lives around these parts I hear. His great grand-pappy ran one of the most heinous and successful slave plantations in the North. Name was known far and wide. Made a fortune off it. You know the deal, Carlos. God may work in mysterious ways, but when He feeling ironic, the shit just become straight predictable.”

  Lost in thought, I make a neither-here-nor-there hrmphing noise.

  “I can see you into something there, Cee. You run along, do your thing. I’ll take a look at the collection.” Doctor Tennessee knows better than to ask too many questions about what I do.

  Riley and I hole up in one of those 24-hour spots under the tracks. We eat eggs and sausages and drink bottomless cups of coffee as the night drifts past. I’ve gotten used to being the crazy guy that orders two of everything and sits there talking to himself. Riley’s gotten used to taking little tiny bites and sipping his coffee with the cup on the table. “I think we been barking up the wrong proverbial tree.”

  “Oh? What’d the good doctor have for you this time?”

  We tumble the situation back and forth a bit before straying into an extended imaginary musing about what our lives must’ve been like.

  We sh
oot the shit ‘til quarter to three. That’s when an older lady comes in surrounded by a squabbling entourage of toddlers and pre-teens. A tall, sour-faced twelve year old girl walks beside her. They both look exhausted but not altogether put out as they shuffle into the table across from us and try to simmer down the slew of bouncing youngins.

  I’m about to get up and be out when a little guy with a bigass afro and corduroy overalls clamors up onto the seat beside Riley and stares at him. Riley looks back at the kid, first with his angry squint and then gradually softening to a sort of Rileysmile. “Wooga wooga,” he says. The boy chuckles, holding eye contact. “Boogady boogady boogady.” More chuckles. The girl and her grandma are busy with the other wee ones. Time seems to have slowed for my best friend. Ever so carefully, he reaches out a shining, see-through hand to the kid. The child reaches back, still gurgling and giggling away, and wraps his own little hand around one of the glowing fingers. His expression doesn’t change, but I can tell something just shattered inside Riley.

  “Let’s go,” he says, when the spell is finally broken and the child wanders off to some new distraction. “I wanna get this over with.”

  At three, we trudge through the humid Manhattan night into West Harlem. Once again, even the trees refuse to rustle on the mourning block. All the houses are dark, but inside restless limbs strain beneath too hot bed sheets and anxious heads play out horrific fantasies in never-ending cycles.

  I can be as quiet as any ghost when I have to. Patience is really all it takes. Move like you’re made of molasses. Sound just falls away from you. You catch your rhythm and eventually, you’re wherever you need to be and no one’s the wiser. Riley pops the door and we slow-mo it up the winding stairs to Calhoun’s office. I turn the knob ever so gently and soft foot in, Riley at my side. It’s completely dark save the little blinking-light city of the computer terminal and modem.

  Riley’s mingling with the statues again and I’m about to start in on the masks when I feel it. Riley stiffens and readies for combat. A wave of revulsion sweeps over me. I close my eyes, investigating the churning ripple of rage that has suddenly become a presence in the room. We both turn around and there, in the easy chair, sits a very old, dimly glowing man.