Burial

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Come on, let’s go,’ I said; and we left the Greenbergs’ silent and abandoned apartment to deal with its ghosts on its own.

  Nine

  The Belford Hotel wasn’t quite as scabby as I had expected it to be. It wasn’t one of those cabbage-smelling roach-infested flophouses you see in Robert de Niro movies. In fact it turned out to be reasonably clean and smart — the kind of old-fashioned family hotel that used to be favoured by travelling salesmen and out-of-towners who couldn’t afford the Sheraton or the Summit. But it had an atmosphere, you know what I mean? An atmosphere of polish and disinfectant and sneaky peeking into communal bathrooms. Prim, but creepy.

  A man sat behind the high mahogany reception counter, reading a book. He was sixtyish, with thick white hair and a bulbous nose and tortoiseshell eyeglasses that magnified his eyes like freshly-opened clams. He wore a well-pressed short-sleeved shirt with surfers and hula girls on it. When I stepped up to the desk he carefully took out a red leather bookmark, and folded it into the book. He was reading The Clocks of Columbus, the biography of James Thurber. I guess the guy was entitled to read anything he liked but somehow this struck me as incongruous.

  ‘Can I help you folks?’ he inquired. I could see by the expression on his face that he was seriously hoping that I wouldn’t ask him for a room for three: Mr and Mrs and Mrs Smith.

  ‘Well, we’re getting a little tired of all the noise that we’ve been hearing through the wall,’ I told him.

  ‘I’m sorry? What noise? What wall?’

  ‘We live right next door, and the noises we’ve been hearing. You’d think somebody was being murdered.’

  The man took off his eyeglasses and laid them on the desk. ‘I’m sorry, sir. I don’t know what noise you could be referring to. We run a real quiet establishment here. Some people think we’re a little old-fashioned, to tell you the truth, because we’re so darn quiet.’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry,’ I snapped back at him. ‘I’ve been hearing noises like you wouldn’t believe. Screams, yells, banging. It’s been terrible.’

  ‘Where do you live, sir?’

  ‘Right next door. Second floor. I don’t know which of your rooms it could be, but it shares a party wall with my dining room.’

  ‘And does your dining room overlook the street or does it overlook the back?’

  ‘The back.’

  ‘That’s room two-twelve, sir. I’ll have a word with them, when I see them. Tell them to keep the noise down.’

  ‘I think I’d like to have a word with them myself.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, you can’t go up there less’n a guest invites you.’

  ‘Well, let me talk to them on the house phone, at least.’

  ‘They’re not in, sir. I’m sorry. They’re very rarely in. In fact I don’t think I’ve seen them for over a week, maybe longer.’

  ‘Can you tell us their names?’ asked Amelia, in her softest, most dove-cooing voice.

  ‘I’m sorry, miss. I’m not at liberty to give out private guest information like that. You do understand.’

  ‘All right,’ said Amelia. ‘But is one of them called George Hope, and is the other one called Andrew Danetree?’

  ‘I’m real sorry, miss,’ the man told her, shaking his head. ‘I’m really not at liberty to —’

  ‘Sir,’ said Amelia, ‘if those are the names of the people occupying room two-twelve, then there’s every likelihood that those men have been murdered.’

  The man’s cheek twitched. ‘Murdered? You don’t mean here, in this hotel?’

  Amelia nodded.

  ‘What, are you the police or something?’ the man demanded. ‘I think I need to see some ID.’

  I smiled at him. ‘We’re not police, sir. We’re just concerned neighbours. Now, would you mind if we went up to see if Mr Hope and Mr Danetree are actually there?’

  ‘You can escort us, of course,’ said Amelia.

  The man looked hesitant I guess he was worried that we were going to take him upstairs and mug him. We did look slightly less than respectable, after all. We had sponged blood from our clothes, so that they were spotted with rusty-coloured damp patches, and none of us had been sleeping too good.

  Amelia said, ‘It’s just that we’ve heard such awful noises. We couldn’t bear to think that they might be lying on the floor in pain, or anything like that.’

  After a lengthy think, the man took down his bunch of keys, buttoned up one more shirt-button, and called to some invisible woman in the room behind him, ‘Alma! I’m taking some people up to two-twelve. Don’t let those kids come in again!’

  He came out from behind the counter. He had an artificial leg, so that he walked with a ducking, swinging motion, and creaked loudly with every step. ‘Damn kids,’ he complained. ‘They come in here and they steal anything that isn’t superglued to the floor. See that square mark on the wall? Last week they stole a steel-engraving of the Croton Reservoir. What’s a nine-year-old kid going to do with a steel-engraving of the Croton Reservoir?’

  We crowded into a tiny elevator that felt as if it had been designed by Mr Otis to fit into his daughter’s doll-house. The man kept creaking his leg and suppressing burps of gas. The elevator took about nine years to reach the second floor. Karen reached behind me and squeezed my hand, partly out of intimacy, I guess, but mostly out of claustrophobia. Amelia kept her eyes on the ceiling, as if willing us to rise faster.

  The elevator doors juddered open. Then we were led along a gloomy, green-carpeted corridor lit by low-wattage bulbs. At last we reached room two-twelve, and the man gave a curiously old-fashioned Oliver-Hardy-type knock.

  ‘Mr Hope? Mr Danetree? Is there anybody in?’

  He did this three times before he was satisfied that nobody was going to answer. I suppose he was trying to impress us that this was a real respectable hotel where a guest’s privacy was paramount

  He held up his key and announced, ‘Pass key.’

  We all nodded. He unlocked the door and opened it wide. ‘Mr Hope? Mr Danetree? It’s Mr Rheiner, the manager.’

  Still no answer. The room was completely dark, and very cold. We sniffed the air and again we smelled that strange flat herbal aroma — the sort of smell that belonged to the open air and to vast distances. Karen shivered.

  Mr Rheiner switched on the light. We found ourselves in a room that was almost exactly the same size as Naomi Greenberg’s dining room, except that it had been partitioned off to create a small bathroom and a closet There were two single beds, both of them covered in faded green candlewick throwovers. The walls were decorated with combed plaster, painted pale yellow. The lemon-coloured Venetian blind was closed tight.

  ‘See, what did I tell you?’ said Mr Rheiner, holding out his hands. ‘Nobody here. Whatever those two gentlemen are doing in New York, they certainly aren’t doing it here.’

  I went to the closet and slid open the door. Inside hung three or four jackets, several pairs of slacks, and half-a-dozen clean shirts. Four of the shirts were fifteen-and-a-half inch collar, the other two were seventeen. Mr Hope was obviously bigger than Mr Danetree, or else it was the other way about. There were five pairs of leather shoes on the closet floor, and one pair of canvas loafers.

  ‘Hey — what are you doing?’ demanded Mr Rheiner, swinging around. ‘You can’t go nosing in there!’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I told him, sliding the door shut. ‘Forgot where I was for a moment.’ I wandered over to Amelia, and said, ‘Anything?’

  Her eyes were glittering. She seemed extremely tense, highly charged up. ‘You bet there’s something. Something very strong indeed — even stronger than the Greenbergs’.’

  I looked around, and sniffed. I could still smell that herby smell, but I couldn’t sense anything else. ‘I don’t feel anything,’ I said. ‘Nothing at all.’

  ‘That coldness?’ she asked, her eyes narrowing in concentration.

  ‘Sure, I can feel that.’

  ‘That pain?’

  I shook
my head. ‘I’d like to say yes, but I really don’t think so.’

  Mr Rheiner shifted uncomfortably on his artificial leg. ‘Are you people quite finished now? Murder, for crying out loud. I ought to call the cops.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I took out my wallet and gave him two crumpled-up portraits of Honest Abe. We left the room and then endured the endless elevator journey down to the lobby.

  ‘I want to thank you for your help,’ I said, as we left the hotel.

  ‘Do you want to leave a number or something?’ Mr Rheiner asked me.

  ‘A number?’

  ‘You know, for when Mr Hope or Mr Danetree gets back.’

  ‘Oh, no. Thanks all the same. That won’t be necessary.’

  ‘I’ll tell them to keep the noise down.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘You do that.’

  He watched us with deep suspicion as we pushed open the swing doors and stepped down into the street.

  ‘Let’s get ourselves a drink,’ I suggested. ‘I’m dying from a surfeit of spirits and a dire lack of booze.’

  We crossed the street and went into a bar called La Boheme. It was painted all in black, with plastic ivy hanging from the ceiling and black-painted chairs and tables, and Frenchified squeeze-box music coming out from behind a four-foot model of a can-can girl. It was one of the few remaining beatnik hangouts from the 1950s, when beatniks wore berets and beards and stripey sweaters and said ‘like’ in front of every sentence. We sat down in the corner and ordered a bottle of red wine.

  It was then that Karen reached into her purse and produced a small red plastic-covered diary.

  ‘Look what I found,’ she said.

  ‘Where did you get this?’ I asked her.

  ‘It was right there on one of the nightstands. He didn’t even see me pick it up.’

  ‘You should take up house-breaking for a living. You’re a natural-born burglar.’

  I ruffled through the diary with my thumb. It belonged to Andrew W. Danetree of Pocomoke City, Maryland. He had rounded, grade-school handwriting, and his diary entries were sparse and less-than-literate — but they turned out to be some of the most mysterious and fascinating reading I had ever come across.

  While I was reading, Amelia said, ‘There’s some force in that room, for definite. I could feel it. It’s very cold, very negative. I don’t quite know how to explain it, but in spiritual terms it feels like somebody’s left the door wide open.’

  ‘The door to where?’ asked Karen. ‘Or maybe I should ask from where?’

  ‘If I knew that, I think I’d know exactly what this disturbance is all about.’

  I swallowed a mouthful of Paul Masson’s worst. ‘Listen to this,’ I said.‘“Tuesday morning 4:25 pm stopped car outside of Salisbury & knew I had to go to NY. No reasnable explanation but I knew I had to.’ And here, listen, ‘Told Billie it was business, guess if I try to tell anybody about it theyll think I’ve fliped.”’

  I turned over a few more pages. ‘“Arived NY Thurs pm from Baltimore, taxi downtown. Had to locate the Belford Hotel on foot but here I am. Around 9 pm George H. a total stranger to me arrived from Brooklyn Center MN and said that he had experienced the same feeling too, right in the middle of work. He just had to come to NY whether he had liked it or not. He found the Belford by walking, too — experienced the same feeling of being drawn.”’

  ‘How about that?’ said Amelia. She opened her purse and took out her cigarettes. ‘Here are two men who didn’t know each other. One came from the back end of Maryland and the other from less-than-beautiful downtown Brooklyn Center, Minnesota. But suddenly they both got the inexplicable feeling that they had to go to New York.’

  ‘Not only inexplicable but irresistible,’ I said. ‘Our friend Andrew W. Danetree even lied to his wife so that he could come here. And these guys don’t just get a vague feeling “go to New York.” Oh, no. These guys have a compulsion to go to the exact same hotel. They’re drawn.’

  Amelia lit her cigarette and said, ‘Read some more.’

  ‘Here we are. “Spent most of Thurs nite trying to decide what made us both come here. We have nothing in common as far as we can work out. I was born in Baltimore and George was born in Cleveland, OH. My father was a painter and decorator, George’s father was a captain in the Army. My background is German originally, George’s family was probably Irish. I’ve been to NY before but George hasn’t. So why are we both here? Why did we both feel exactly the same feeling?.”’

  I turned over the next and last entry. ‘“Woke up early Fri am feeling anxious & threatened. George reports the same. In fact he said he thinks we’re going to die. He can’t explain it. He says he had a nightmare about men and women being killed and mutilated, little children, too. Then he felt that there was a dark shadow standing close behind him, and he was too scared of it to turn around. I had a dream like that, too. My dream was so real I didn’t know if I was asleep or awake. There was a shadow in the corner but it was much, much more than a shadow. It was watching me and it wanted to kill me.”’

  I closed the diary.

  ‘Is that it?’ asked Amelia, and I nodded.

  ‘I have to see that room again,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, yes? And how do you propose to do that? Especially with Rheiner the Whiner on the desk.’

  Amelia looked at me with those challenging eyes — the same challenging eyes that had eventually led me to look for somebody a little less demanding. ‘Do you have a head for heights?’ she asked me.

  ‘You’re not expecting me to climb up a drainpipe?’

  ‘No, but the fire-escape from the Greenbergs’ apartment and the fire-escape from the Belford Hotel are only about five feet apart. All we have to do is jump from one to the other, and we can reach the back window of room two-twelve.’

  ‘Amelia —’ I warned her.

  But Amelia said, ‘Harry, we can’t turn our backs on this now. We can’t turn our backs on Martin Vaizey, either. We got him into this mess and now it’s up to us to get him out of it. The only way we can do that is to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was possessed.’

  ‘“Shadow of a doubt,” hunh?’ I said, sardonically. ‘And what if we get arrested for breaking in?’

  ‘Under the circumstances, Mr Erskine, I think that’s a chance we’ll have to take.’

  I’m very uncomfortable with heights. I don’t mind flying. I don’t mind tall buildings. But I hate looking over cliffs at the sea foaming about two hundred feet below me; or standing on twenty-fifth-floor balconies and looking down at the tops of people’s heads and tiny cars and buses. For some weird reason, I’m always seized by this terrible urge to throw myself off — to find out what it’s like to fall. They say that you’re conscious right till the instant of impact The trouble is, very few spirits have any clear recollection of how they died, especially the ones who died violently, and so you can’t really ask them what it was like. Or so Amelia told me. Maybe they do remember but it’s just too harrowing for them to talk about it

  The Greenbergs’ window had been screwed into place, and it took us almost half-an-hour to free it. Eventually, however, I managed to prize out all of the screws and chip six or seven layers of dried paint away from the frame, and lift the lower sash two or three inches. When I couldn’t force it up any further I pushed one end of Naomi Greenberg’s ironing-board into it and knelt on the other end with all of my weight. With a shuddering groan the window lifted and I overbalanced onto the floor, knocking my head against the leg of the couch. I used some spectacular language.

  We climbed out onto the fire-escape. Below us, the yard was shadowy and dark except for litter and broken glass. The fire-escape groaned as Karen stepped onto it, and we all stood stock-still and listened.

  ‘Are you sure it’s safe?’ asked Karen.

  ‘No,’ I told her.

  The Belford Hotel fire-escape had looked pretty damned close when viewed from the inside of the Greenbergs’ apartment. But now I was out here, se
venty feet above a junk-strewn concrete yard, it mysteriously seemed to have shifted itself two or three feet further away.

  I climbed with some difficulty over the railing of the Greenbergs’ fire-escape. By holding onto one of the rusty iron uprights I could then lean way out until I could grasp the railings of the Belford Hotel fire-escape. That was the theory, anyway. In practise it looked way too far away; and way too high up; and way too goddamned dangerous.

  I leaned further and further out. Below me I could make out the cinderblock wall that separated the Greenbergs’ yard from the yard of the Belford Hotel. It was thickly encrusted with glittering slices of broken glass. I swallowed and looked up again. I didn’t need to look down to know what would happen to me if I fell.

  ‘Harry, are you okay?’ called Amelia, in a loud stage-whisper.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. My grip on the rust-scaled upright seemed to be even more tenuous than ever, and I felt the strength in my knees gradually washing away like mud being hosed off a sidewalk. I thought: Jesus, I’m not going to make it. I’m going to fall. I’m going to hit that glass-topped wall and it’s going to cut me in half. My legs are going to end up in the Greenbergs’ yard and my torso’s going to end up next door.

  ‘You can reach it easy,’ Amelia urged me. ‘You only have to stretch out two or three inches further.’

  I closed my eyes for a moment and listened to the grumbling ambient roar of Manhattan’s traffic; the sirens and the car-horns and the grinding of the trucks. I said a kind of prayer which involved God granting me the strength of Arnold Schwarzenegger, the balance of Blondin, and the bluff self-confidence of Teddy Roosevelt, if only on a purely temporary basis. Then I opened my eyes and focused on the fire-escape railing opposite and lunged for it.

  And caught it. And swung across, barking my shin on the rusty cross-tie. And lost my footing, and swung around, barking my elbow and catching my ribs against the railing.