Shade of Pale

by Kihn, Greg;

  “What makes you think this woman is the Banshee?”

  Loomis paused, choosing his next words carefully. “I know it in my heart. Don’t ask me to explain. I don’t know why, but I just know.”

  “Have you always known about the Banshee?”

  “Yeah. My grandfather told me when I was a little boy in Ireland.”

  “Tell me more about your grandfather.”

  “In my family, the Banshee had come before. My grandfather knew it; that’s why he told me. You see, only certain people are marked.”

  “Do you believe you are marked, Mr. Loomis?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Because of something you did?”

  “Yes.”

  “What would that be?”

  “I am born of the Loomis clan, and the Banshee knows us. The damned thing is out there waiting for me, and when the time comes, she will kill me the same way she killed my grandfather and countless others along my family line. But, most importantly, I know who she is, and the Banshee only kills those who know her face.”

  Jukes let those words hang in the air.

  “Only those who know …,” Loomis repeated in a whisper.

  “Do you have any guilt feelings about your grandfather or anyone else in your family?”

  “No, God damn it! Skip the fifty-cent psychoanalysis! You don’t understand. This is real. Only the people who know her die. I know her. She’s been following me! Don’t you see? I am going to die and there’s nothing you or anybody else can do about it!”

  The phone rang. Jukes snatched it up expectantly, almost glad for the momentary diversion. He was strict about not being disturbed when with a patient, so he knew the call had to be important.

  Ms. Temple’s voice came through the receiver. “I’m sorry, Dr. Wahler, but it’s your sister; she says it’s an emergency.”

  Jukes sighed. “Cathy? All right, put her on.”

  Jukes looked up at Loomis and said, “Excuse me; I have a call I have to take. It’ll only be a second.”

  “Hello?”

  The voice came over the line uneasy and quivering. “Oh, Jukey, I’m so glad I found you! It’s Bobby; he … he beat me up again! He broke the television and—”

  Jukes cut her off. “Ah, Cathy, I’d love to talk to you—I really would—but I’m with a patient right now. Would it be possible for me to call you back in thirty minutes?” Jukes was careful to avoid an annoyed modulation of voice. He kept his conversational tone professionally even.

  Cathy’s breathless voice crackled in the earpiece. “Oh … OK, uhm, I’m sorry. I’m at the Doral Hotel, room 651.”

  “Stay where you are. I’ll get right back to you; I promise. Do you have the number there?”

  Cathy recited the phone number and Jukes jotted it down.

  He’s beating her up again, Jukes realized as he hung up. That shithead Bobby is asking for it. Why in God’s name does she stay with him? He’s already sent her to the hospital once.

  Ever since their parents died, Jukes had looked after his little sister, had taken care of her. It was his father’s last request.

  But Cathy was wild.

  Things have really been going downhill since she met Bobby. I hated that asshole photographer at first sight, with his tattoos and his leather pants.

  Bobby the monster. The boyfriend from Hell. Drugs, kinky sex, God knows what else. Poor Cathy is in way over her head this time. But the more he abuses her, the more she keeps coming back.

  He turned his attention back to Loomis. The good doctor, the miracle worker, was about to solve some more problems. By compartmentalizing his thinking, he was able to put the thoughts of Cathy aside and focus on Declan Loomis. He looked at the haunted, troubled face of the man across from him.

  The poor bastard, I want to help him. Right after I help Cathy. Seems like I’m helping everybody.

  But who’s going to help me?

  CHAPTER TWO

  Mrs. Willis had pains. She always had pains. Thirty years ago, when she was seventy-two years old, she had what she called “good days and bad days”; now they were all bad days.

  Little aches and pains had merged into one long body ache. Her 102-year-old bones creaked when she got out of bed each morning, winter or summer.

  She slowly padded her way into the kitchen and filled her teakettle with water. While she waited for it to boil, she went into the narrow living room of her row house and greeted her miniature zoo.

  “Hello, little darlings,” she whispered.

  Her Irish accent still colored the words, though she’d been a resident of Manhattan for over sixty years. Mrs. Willis would be forever Irish. She carried it with her in every fold and wrinkle of her freckled skin, like the scent of talc and clover.

  “Did you sleep well?” she asked them.

  The 102 glass figurines, one for every year she’d survived, stood mute and fragile. She thrust an ancient, gnarled finger into the shelves and straightened a tiny glass elephant. Most of the figurines were smaller than her thumb and deliberately delicate. She had collected animals of every description over the decades, and when she become too old, her many loyal admirers brought animals to her from all over the world.

  They resonated with her thoughts. The more fragile and tiny, the better the reception, the louder the broadcast. When she first married, her husband explained that radio waves, floating invisibly in the air, could be magically caught in a tiny crystal. Once caught, they could be listened to.

  Later she discovered that miniature glass figurines could capture thoughts and ethereal “faerie messages” from beyond. Her husband told her it was because she had the second sight and that the little glass animals only triggered her psychic abilities.

  They spoke to her. They told her things. They let her listen to the ocean of thoughts and emotions that roiled just outside her door. In the great city, all things were there.

  “I think I’ll have my tea out here in the living room, where I can think so much better.”

  The glass animals stood apprehensively before her. Today they were different. Today something was wrong.

  Mrs. Willis sensed it.

  She leaned toward the glass case that held the animals until her nose was just an inch away from a transparent matchstick giraffe.

  “Are you trying to tell me something, my sweet one?”

  A roar erupted suddenly in her ears. It swept into her brain like the shock wave from a nearby explosion.

  She staggered back, away from the display case.

  One thought filled her consciousness, one sound, unmistakable across the centuries. She’d heard it before, the night her father died, the mournful, frightening wail that always brought death.

  Her song.

  “Oh, my God in Heaven,” the old woman rasped. “It can’t be. To cross the ocean? To come here?”

  She sat down wearily on an overstuffed parlor chair. The ringing in her head subsided. She clutched the arms of the chair as if the room were moving, but the figurines and everything else stood motionless.

  “Sweet Jesus,” she whispered. “It never ends.”

  The teakettle whistled sharply, like a warning siren, and she went back into the kitchen to turn it off.

  She sat down at the table and poured a cup of steaming water into a dainty china cup. She lowered a tea bag into the cup and held it with her fingers.

  It dangled, steeping in the scalding water at the end of a fine white string. She stared into the cup and worried.

  “The time has come at last,” she said. “Destiny is now.”

  A clock ticked; outside, an ambulance cried. Mrs. Willis sat for an hour, gazing at the string that held the tea bag. The brew was black and cold now.

  She poured it down the drain and went to the closet. Behind the clothes, nestled amid the mothballs, she found the box containing her copy of the Book of Kells.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Jukes Wahler thought about Loomis as he locked his office, walked across the hall, and pus
hed the elevator button. The windows on this floor of the Bradley Building faced the Parker Arms apartments, an older brick building. They were separated by Thirty-seventh Street. At night many of the windows were illuminated, and Jukes often wondered about the people living there.

  His eyes wandered across the street.

  He caught his breath.

  It was she. She stared at him from one of the windows, the red hair and pale skin unmistakable. Jukes’s jaw dropped.

  It can’t be. It’s just someone else with red hair who happened to be passing by the window when I looked. Someone else with flaming red hair and impossibly pale skin, that’s all. Someone else who just happens to be staring at me, across the avenue, through two panes of glass, at night. He wrestled with the idea as the elevator arrived.

  Whatever this is, it’s not anything supernatural, he thought. It’s either another one of those strange Morticia Addams types with red hair, or it’s an incredible coincidence.

  There’s that word again.

  Jukes’s apartment waited warm and reassuring, an emotional oasis. He lived in modest bachelor splendor, favoring bookcases and leather chairs. His prodigious jazz and classical CD collection dominated one wall. A bizarre Picasso portrait of Dora Marr stared at him from across the hall, a print he bought after attending the Picasso and Portraiture show with Cathy at MOMA. It was Cathy’s idea. She loved the facial distortion and thought the colors were just what Jukes’s living room needed. And of course he went along with it, not really in love with the thing, but to make her happy. And it said something about Cathy. But tonight Dora Marr made him uneasy and he avoided looking at the picture.

  He phoned Cathy at the Doral Hotel, and she agreed to come right over.

  For the last two years Cathy had been living with Bobby Sudden, a photographer. Jukes disliked photographers, he thought they were all voyeurs, but Bobby seemed particularly bad. When Cathy showed him some of Bobby’s pictures he had to bite his tongue Jukes thought Bobby’s work violent and brutish, the worst kind of crap masquerading as art.

  He leafed through a book of Bobby’s photos that Cathy had given him as a gift last Christmas. He kept it out of a sense of morbid fascination, but then he kept everything Cathy gave him. And that book never failed to depress him; page after page of moody black-and-white images of girls with bored, dangerous faces, in various bondage scenarios. It was the overall attitude of Bobby’s work that Jukes found offensive: the depiction of women, of his sister, as objects, as slaves, as unhappy victims in Bobby’s perverted fantasies. Jukes found nothing erotic about it; in fact, he found it repugnant.

  Wedged between two of the pages was one old photo of Cathy before Bobby. It was a color print of her first modeling card, when Cathy was an ingenue with a future as bright as her smile. Her face beamed; she looked the very essence of unspoiled beauty. In contrast, Bobby’s dark images of her were of a completely different person.

  Another piece of paper detached itself from the book and fluttered to the floor. As he bent over to retrieve it, he realized with a scowl what it was—a doctor bill from Bobby’s last tirade. He scanned it for the hundredth time, still not wanting to believe.

  That son of a bitch has beaten her up for the last time. Jukes felt his rage dilate and focus on Bobby.

  Jukes looked at the doctor bill and remembered how he had insisted that she file charges with the police, which she did, and later dropped.

  And then, incredibly, against Jukes’s pleading and every logical argument, she went back to that monster again.

  Jukes blamed himself. For all his professional training, Jukes was impotent when it came to Cathy.

  He begged his sister to move out, to leave Bobby, but she stayed. For some unknown and terrible reason, she loved Bobby—and it was killing her.

  Down deep, Jukes had always believed that Cathy was the reason he became a psychiatrist. Yet he never understood her, even though they’d grown up together. Everyone else, it seemed, he could help, but not Cathy, and that rankled Jukes.

  She seemed to be slipping further away, and Jukes was determined to pull her back.

  He shuddered to think what his parents would have said: “Instead of watching over her, you’re watching her destroy herself.”

  But as easy as it had been for him to understand the monster Bobby, that’s how hard it was for him to fathom his own sister, the victim Cathy. Knowing her background, he agonized that he could not think of one event, one unhappy period of time, one tragedy, other than the death of their parents, that would have shaped so strongly a victim’s personality. Whatever events that caused Cathy’s problems were part of her secret life, the part of her she never showed Jukes. The part Bobby lived in.

  The doorbell rang, bringing Jukes back.

  He opened the door and looked into Cathy’s blackened eyes. His stomach turned.

  The insanity of the situation overpowered him, and he fell into the easy grip of helpless rage. She stood there in the doorway like a monument to his failure. He stepped forward and threw his arms around her. They embraced for an unspoken minute, and Jukes felt the tears well up.

  “Oh, God … Cath—”

  “Jukey, please, don’t say anything.”

  “You look like you’ve been hit by a truck,” he said softly as he led her inside.

  The skin around her eyes was discolored, her lower lip was swollen and split, and there were bruises the length of her arms.

  “He did this to you?” Jukes asked as he examined her wounds, relieved to see nothing was broken.

  “Yes.”

  Jukes smoldered, his face darkened. He flashed Cathy a look so uncharacteristically cold it frightened her.

  “Jukey, I had no choice. We had a fight; it escalated. It was all my fault. He … he didn’t mean it; I know he didn’t. It was an accident, that’s all. One thing led to another—”

  “One thing led to another? Since when does a domestic argument lead to criminal assault?”

  She turned away, tears streaming down her face. “This time I won’t go back; I promise.”

  “You’re damn right you won’t go back!” he shouted. “You’re staying here with me until I sort this out, do you understand? Jesus, it’s a good thing Dad’s not alive to see this or he’d kill the guy. I swear he’d get out his old shotgun and blow the asshole’s brains out for this!” Jukes paused and took a breath. He gave her a look that said, Maybe that’s what I should do.

  “I don’t want you going anywhere near that jerk, OK? You’re lucky he hasn’t killed you yet. I’ll see he winds up behind bars for this; you can bet on that. Then we’ll get a restraining order. I don’t want him to come within a hundred yards of you.”

  The tears began to flow from Cathy’s discolored eyes.

  “Jeez, Cath. How can you let this happen?”

  She fell into his arms, trembling. “I don’t know.”

  “You’ve got to promise me you’ll never go back to him, no matter what happens. Never, ever, ever go back.”

  “What about my stuff?”

  “Forget about it. Just leave it there. I’ll buy you all new stuff.”

  “But where am I gonna live?”

  “You can stay here until we find you an apartment. OK? It’s no biggie. The important thing is that you stay away from Bobby. We’ll let the police handle the whole thing.”

  Cathy fell silent for a moment, but from her body language Jukes could feel the reluctance she had when the conversation turned to taking legal action against Bobby.

  He took her face gently in his hands, careful not to touch the bruises, and spoke into it. “You’ve got to face it, Cathy. Bobby’s time in your life is over. It’s madness. For God’s sake let it go; can’t you see it’s killing you? You need help.”

  Cathy looked down. “Can’t you help me?”

  “I don’t think I could be objective about you on a professional level. It’s just not done. I’m referring you to a colleague, Dr. James Kendall. Jim is the best in the field at th
is type thing.”

  Cathy looked hurt. “But you’re so smart, Jukey. You know everything … you got all those awards—”

  “They don’t mean anything if I can’t help you, Cath.”

  “What’s wrong with me? Why do I keep going back?”

  Jukes shrugged. “Why don’t we let Jim Kendall figure it out. Whatever it is, we can handle it. In the meantime, let me take care of those abrasions and get some ice on your eyes.”

  While Cathy slept, Jukes called the police and reported the incident. He told them he’d be down first thing in the morning, with Cathy, to file charges. He next phoned his lawyer and they agreed to meet at the police station at 9:00 A.M.

  This time Bobby would get what’s coming.

  Then Jukes made himself a drink and sat back in his leather easy chair to think. Leaning back with a swallow of bourbon in his mouth, he let it swirl slowly down his throat and closed his eyes.

  He saw the image of his father. That’s how it usually began.

  His father had always told him to take care of his sister; he must have said that every day of Jukes’s life He could almost hear the man’s familiar voice, loud and abrasive, booming through the house: “Jukey, remember, you’re the big boy. You’re the older brother, and what does the older brother do?”

  “Takes care of the little sister,” he had replied timidly.

  “Damn right.”

  Then his father would nod contentedly, never once considering the fact that Jukes might fail. When his father died and Cathy was only fifteen years old, Jukes swore to protect and care for her. His father had died knowing that and believing that Jukes would always be there for her.

  A year later, when his mother passed away, she, too, wanted to hear those words. Little Cathy was too young, too weak, to take care of herself, she said. Jukes had to do it.

  When Jukes next saw Declan Loomis, the deterioration the man had undergone in just twenty-four hours shocked him. Loomis’s gaunt face looked resigned to death. His eyes were sunken orbs, frightened and dead.

  He walked slowly into the office, weary and defeated. He looked at Jukes and smiled weakly. “It’s almost time, Doc. She’s gettin’ closer.”