999

by Al Sarrantonio

“So bring them with us.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Bring them with us. Bring the dogs.”

  “Bring the dogs?”

  Something faintly like panic edged his voice.

  “Yeah, we’ll bring ‘em.”

  “No, it simply wouldn’t work.”

  “It wouldn’t work?”

  “No, it wouldn’t.”

  “Why not?” Freeboard asked him.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know? You’re scared shidess, you literary asshole! Do you sleep with a nightlight, you flaming fyook?”

  “Fyook has never been a noun,” Dare said coldly.

  “Yes, it is,” shot back Freeboard.

  “Poor usage. Furthermore, your vile and repellent accusations, Miss Whoever You Are, are absurd if not pathetic.”

  “Are they true?”

  The author flushed.

  “Why don’t you find some other writer, for heaven’s sakes!” he whined. “My God, Joanie, Vanities can get you your pick!”

  “Well, they picked.”

  “’They picked’? What on earth do you mean?”

  They were sitting at a window table for two in the Hotel Sherry Netherland bar. It was not quite five o’clock and the tables on either side were still empty. “Hold it,” said Freeboard. She was groping through a briefcase. “There’s a really spooky picture of the house. Let me find it.” Troubled and distracted, the publisher of Vanities darted an apprehensive glance at the door as he heard another patron coming in from the street. It was no one that he knew, he saw with relief. Nervously tapping the stem of an unlit briar pipe against his teeth, he shifted his fretful gaze back to Freeboard. “Four of us alone in a haunted house,” she effused, “and Terry’s first magazine piece ever!”

  A waiter placed a chilled Manhattan cocktail softly on the crisp white tablecloth in front of her, and then a glass of chardonnay in front of Redmund. “Chardonnay, sir?”

  “Right,” murmured Redmund. “Thanks.” In his eyes, open wide and faintly bulging, an incipient hysteria quietly lurked. When the waiter had gone he leaned his head in to Freeboard. “Don’t you think we should talk about what happened at the party?”

  “Oh, what happened?” Freeboard responded absently, still groping through her purse for the photos. And then abruptly looked up with a stunned realization. “Oh, what happened!” Her hands flew to Redmund’s, squeezing them ardently. “Oh, yes, Jim! That’s all I want to talk about, think about! Come on, let’s get this article out of the way and then we can get back to real life, to us! Do you like it? You’ll publish it?”

  “It’s interesting, Joan,” observed Redmund.

  Freeboard let go of his hands, leaned back, and then folded her arms and looked away. “Yeah, right.”

  She knew very well what “interesting” meant.

  “But it really isn’t right for us,” Redmund pleaded. “Joan, look … The other night was incredible.”

  “Sure.”

  “Just amazing. More exciting than anything I think I’ve ever known.”

  “Yeah, me too,” Freeboard murmured. She was dully staring at the decorative fountain directly across from the Plaza Hotel.

  “But it was wrong, love, we made a mistake,” Redmund faltered. “I thought it all over today while I was jogging and …”

  Freeboard turned to stare at him in blank surmise.

  “Well, I could never leave my wife,” said the publisher firmly. “I just couldn’t. This is taking us nowhere, Joanie. If I didn’t tell you now there’d be a lot more pain down the line. I’m sorry. I’m so terribly sorry.”

  The Realtor continued to stare at him numbly, her eyes growing wider in disbelief.

  “You’re sorry,” she echoed.

  He gloomed into his drink.

  “Yes, I know; that’s a lame word, isn’t it—sorry.”

  Redmund heard a single, stifled sob, looked up and saw Freeboard choking back tears. “Ah, dammit,” he fumbled. The Realtor clutched at her linen napkin and held it tightly to her face; she appeared to be weeping into it softly.

  “I feel awful … horrible,” Redmund groped. “Now how do I live in that condo you sold me? I’ll be seeing you everywhere … in every hallway, every square of parquet.”

  This seemed to propel the weeping real estate broker to a noticeably higher emotional pitch, although one could not confidently distinguish, with anything approaching absolute certitude, her sudden, soft moan of pain from a desperate attempt to stifle a guffaw. Redmund glanced around to see if anyone was watching them, and then Jumbled at emptying his pipe. “Listen, Joanie, that article; it sounds—well, very challenging. Really. You’re certain that Terence would do it?”

  “Redmund won’t do it unless you write it,” said Freeboard, concluding her account of the meeting.

  “You are Liza Doolittle’s evil twin.”

  “Liza Who?”

  Dare assessed the avid shine in her eyes, the lower hp jutting out, the dimpled chin tilted upward defiantly. He saw the frightened child inside. “It isn’t the money at all, is it Joanie? It’s that ravenous tiger burning bright in your soul, that desperate drive to stay ahead, to keep winning, that need to keep proving that you’re really okay.”

  She frowned and looked puzzled. “It isn’t the money?”

  Abruptly a door from the beach clicked open and into the room bounded two yapping poodles, their claws etching clittering sounds on the floor. They were followed by a clubfooted man in his forties, a houseman Dare had hired years before out of pity.

  Freeboard glared at a poodle that had stopped at her feet and was staring at her leg with intense speculation. “Don’t even think about it,” she threatened, “or I’m turning you into a tiny rug.”

  “Go, Maria! Scott!” Dare warned. “She’s a killer! Run! She meant it!” He looked over at the houseman. “Pierre, sortez les chiens.”

  The houseman nodded and replied. “Immédiatemont” He clapped his hands at the dogs. “Allez les chiens! Allez sortez! Nous allons dehors!” The dogs skittered away through an inner door and the houseman followed them, one shoulder low, a shoe clumping.

  “This means a whole lot to me, Terry. A lot.”

  The author turned his leonine head to her and stared. He had bought this very house through Freeboard’s offices, it was how he had come to meet her; yet never since that time had she asked him for anything, not even for a copy of one of his books. His celebrity meant nothing to the girl, that he knew; and that, for some reason, she cared for him deeply. He searched her eyes for the secret wounds that he’d learned to detect behind their gleam of self-will.

  “A whole lot,” she repeated.

  “And how long would we be there?”

  “Five days.”

  She explained how Dr. Gabriel Case, the psychologist, professor and expert on the subject of hauntings, would precede them to the house with his special equipment and set it all up before they arrived. Most of their luggage would be sent on ahead, and when Anna Trawley had landed in New York they would all take a limo to Craven’s Cove, where the motor launch would carry them across to the island. “Case is making all the arrangements,” she finished. “I mean like the phones and utilities and crud.”

  “How very sporting.”

  “Yeah, he’s neat.”

  “He’s neat?”

  “Oh, well, at least on the phone. I’ve never met him.”

  “You conned him into doing all of this on the phone?”

  “Come on, Terry, I’m paying him a bundle. Okay?”

  “Oh, I see.” The author turned stiffly to his painting. “So the fix is in. I should have known.”

  The Realtor frowned and moved in closer.

  “Listen, let’s get serious,” she said.

  “Oh, yes, serious.”

  “Margoittai is packing all our meals. The whole time we’re at the house we’ll be eating Four Seasons.”

  The author’s brush stroke froze in midair.


  “Ah, Mephistopheles!”

  “Is that a yes?”

  The year was 1993.

  Later on there would be serious doubts about that.

  PART TWO

  Chapter Three

  The carved front door of the mansion burst open as if by the force of a desperate thought. “Holy shit, is this a hurricane or what!” exclaimed Freeboard. Sopping in a glistening yellow sou’wester provided by the captain of the launch Far Traveler, she staggered and tumbled into the entry hall with a keening wind at her back. She turned to see Dare rushing up the front stoop, and Trawley, carrying a bag, behind him, slower, deliberate and unhurried. A rain of all the waters of the earth pelted down.

  Freeboard cupped a hand to her mouth:

  “You okay, Mrs. Trawley?” she squalled.

  “Oh, yes, dear!” the psychic called back. “I’m fine!”

  A booming thunder gripped the sky by the shoulders and shook it. The sudden storm that had arisen as they crossed had been a terror, buffeting the launch with tempestuous waves. Hurricane warnings had been issued that morning, but the winds had been expected to diminish at landfall. This had not occurred.

  Dare entered and dropped a light bag to the floor. “Joan, I owe you a flogging for this,” he vowed. “I knew that I never should have done it.”

  “Well, you did it,” Freeboard told him. “Now for shitssakes, watch your mouth around these people, would you, Terry? I had to practically beg them to do this.”

  “Thank heaven I gave you no trouble.”

  Freeboard lifted off her windjammer hat, and then gestured to the open door, where the psychic seemed to falter as she climbed the front steps. “Terry, give Mrs. Trawley a hand.”

  “Oh, very well.”

  Dare giraffed toward the psychic with a limp, loose gait and reached out for her bag. “May I help you?”

  “Oh, no thank you. I’m fine. I travel light.”

  “Yes, of course. Tambourines weigh almost nothing.”

  “Jesus, Terry!”

  Trawley entered, swept her hat off and set down her bag. “That’s all right,” she told Freeboard benignly; “I didn’t hear it.” In tact, she had heard enough from Dare in the limo, including a request to compare her methods with those of Whoopi Goldberg in the morion picture Ghost, in addition to a penetrating follow-up question concerning the cholesterol content of ectoplasm. At each sally, Trawley’d nodded her head and smiled faintly, mutely staring out serenely at the landscape through her window, and the effect of this on Dare had at last begun to show: with every mile that brought him closer to the island and the mansion, his darts at matters psychic or supernatural had grown increasingly frequent and acerbic. “Edgar Cayce reportedly first went into trance,” he asserted as the limousine neared Bear Mountain, “as an excuse for not going to school, and when someone claimed a frog that he had kept in his pocket was somehow cured of mononucleosis, why, of course, people tended to sit up and take notice.”

  Freeboard leaned into the wind and shut the door. In the silence, it was Dare who first noticed the music. “Dearest God, am I in heaven?” he exclaimed. “Cole Porter!” The author’s face was aglow with a child’s first joy as from behind the stout doors that led into the Great Room drifted a melody played on a piano.

  Dare beamed. “My favorite: ‘Night and Day’!”

  Freeboard moved toward the doors.

  “That you in there, Doc?” she called out.

  “Miss Freeboard?”

  The voice from within was deep and pleasant and oddly unmuffled by the thickness of the doors. Freeboard opened them wide and stepped into the Great Room. All of its lamps were lit and glowing, splashing the wood-paneled walls with life, and in the crackle of the firepit flames leapt cheerily, blithe to the longing in the notes of “Night and Day.” Freeboard breathed in the scent of burning pine from the fire. The howlings of the storm were a world away.

  “Yeah, we’re here!” she called out to the man at the piano. She smiled, moving toward him, while at the same time removing her dripping sou’wester. Behind her strode Dare and, more slowly, Anna Trawley. Freeboard’s boots made a squishing sound. They were soaked.

  “Ah, yes, there you all are again, safe and sound,” said the man at the piano. “I’m so glad. I was worried.”

  He had strong good looks, Freeboard noticed: long wavy black hair above a chiseled face that seemed torn whole from some mythic quarry. The firelight flickered and danced on his eyes and she saw that they were dark but wasn’t sure of their color. She judged him in his forties or perhaps early fifties. He was wearing a short-sleeved khaki shirt and khaki pants.

  “This storm is amazing, don’t you think?” he exclaimed. “Did you order this weather, Mr. Dare? Are you to blame?”

  Dare was noted for his Gothic mystery novels.

  “I believe I ordered Chivas,” the author said crisply. He and Freeboard had arrived at the piano and stopped while Anna Trawley hung back beside a grouping of furniture that was clustered around the fireplace. She was glancing all around the room with a puzzled and uncertain, tentative air.

  “Are you a ghost?”

  Dare was speaking to the man at the piano.

  Freeboard turned to him, incredulous.

  “What crap is this?” she hissed in an irritated undertone.

  “That’s how they show them on the spook ride at Disneyland,” said Dare in a full, firm voice: “A lot of spirits dancing while a big one plays piano.”

  “I’ll strangle your dogs, you little creep!” Freeboard gritted.

  Anna Trawley sank down into an overstuffed chair and fixedly stared at the man at the piano. “I’m Gabriel Case,” he declared. He stood up. “I’m quite honored that you’ve come, Mr. Dare. And Mrs. Trawley.”

  “Oh, please don’t stop playing!” Dare insisted.

  “Then I won’t.”

  Case sat down and began to play “All Through the Night.” Freeboard stood quietly studying him. His eyes, she now saw, were pitch-black, so that even his casual gaze seemed to pierce, and down from his cheekbone almost to his jaw raced a vivid, deep scar that jagged like lightning. Freeboard heard a muted roll of thunder far away; the rain on the windows was patting more softly now, like a melancholy background for the song.

  “So, Miss Freeboard,” Case continued. His smile now was brilliant. Like a fucking archangel, the Realtor thought. “I’m so glad to meet the face behind the telephone at last,” Case said. “And a lovely face at that, if I may say so.”

  “How long have you been here?” Freeboard asked.

  “Seems forever. What’s the matter, Miss Freeboard? You’re frowning.”

  “You don’t look like your picture,” she said. She moved closer, appraising him intently, looking puzzled. She added, “The one on the back of the book.”

  “Ghosts and Hauntings?”

  Freeboard nodded.

  “Yes, they wanted something spooky,” he told her, “so they posed me in a very strange light.”

  “Guess they did.”

  “I’ve read all of your works, Mr. Dare,” Case effused. “All quite wonderful. Really.”

  “Thank you.”

  “My absolute favorite was Gilroy’s Confession” Case lifted his hands from the keys of the piano. He was looking at Freeboard. “There you go again,” he said, not unpleasantly. “What’s wrong?”

  For once again she was frowning.

  “This has happened before,” she said oddly.

  Case leaned in to her as if he hadn’t heard. “What was that?”

  “I’m having déjà vu,” she answered.

  “This is neither the time nor the place,” snapped Dare.

  Case chuckled and Freeboard was bewildered as to why.

  The author glanced up at a painting high on the wall above the massive fireplace, a life-sized figure of a man in the dress of a bygone time, perhaps the thirties. Though the rest of the painting had a sharp and rich presence, the face of its subject was milky and occl
uded, presenting a hazy, oval blank.

  “Who’s this?” Dare asked.

  Case looked up. “Dr. Edward Quandt, the original owner.”

  “Why on earth is his face like that?” Dare wondered.

  In the shadows Trawley looked up at the painting.

  Case nodded. “Yes, it’s strange,” he observed. “Very strange.”

  “It’s the haircut.”

  Case turned and saw Freeboard staring at him moughtfully. “Yeah, I think that’s it,” she went on. “That’s what’s different. It’s the haircut.” “Hello?”

  Warm and mysterious, a field of dark flowers, the husky voice floated across the room with the breath of some indefinable emotion, like remembrance of a long-lost summer or of grace.

  Case stared past the others. His expression had changed.

  “Ah, here’s Morna,” he said very softly.

  Her head slightly angled to the side, as if questioning, a lissome young woman was slowly approaching them, moving with a soft and gliding motion like a figure in the corridors of a dream. Her features were rawboned and rugged, imperfect, with protruding high cheekbones and a large jutting jaw, and yet she gave an effect of sensuality and beauty. She wore a paisley-printed purplish taffeta skirt, a white shirt and a silken red string tie. Set deep in the shadowed gold of her skin, her widely spaced pale green eyes were startling. Case stood up slowly and met her gaze.

  “Yes,” she said, hairing before them. “I have come.”

  Her long black hair cascaded to her shoulders, smelling of hyacinth and morning. For a moment Case continued to stare. “Morna, these are our guests,” he said at last. “Miss Freeboard. Mr. Dare.”

  “How do you do?” said the girl. Her brief glance took them in.

  “And Mrs. Trawley,” Case added with a gesture toward the psychic. “Mrs. Trawley is clairvoyant, Morna.”

  The girl turned and fixed her bright green gaze on Trawley. She held it there for seconds. And then she turned back and slightly nodded. “Yes.”

  “Morna is my housekeeper,” Case explained. “No one else lives on the island, as you know; we’re quite isolated here. Morna’s kindly volunteered to help out.”

  “Aren’t there people in the town across the way?” asked Dare.