999

by Al Sarrantonio

  A faint, high note of strain tinged his voice.

  “Yes, there are,” answered Case, “but …”

  He hesitated, silently searching their faces.

  “But what?” Dare demanded a bit too crisply.

  Case took the author’s sou’wester from his hands. “Well, you’re quite soaked through,” he said. “We can talk this all over later on; you know, try to get properly acquainted and all. But for now I’m sure you’re anxious to get into dry clothes. Morna, kindly show our friends to their rooms, would you please?”

  “Your hair was longer in the picture,” said Freeboard. “That’s the difference.” Once again she was fixedly staring at Case.

  Case turned to her, smiling a little, and he paused. In his eyes some ambiguous emotion lurked, like a wanly affectionate, patient sadness. He held the Realtor’s gaze, then spoke quietly. “Yes.”

  By late that morning, once again the rain had quickened and Freeboard was pacing back and forth in her room. She had a phone at her ear and kept irritably whipping the cord from her path. Again and again she breathed out, “This is nuts!”

  In addition to an attic section and a basement, the mansion’s rooms were arranged on three levels. The investigators’ rooms were all a-row along a hallway on the second floor overlooking the Great Room. Freeboard’s suite was the closest to the staircase. Spacious and airy, it had its own fireplace, a high vaulted ceiling and heavy wood beams, but its only two windows were high and narrow, so that both of the bedside lamps were turned on, pouring light on a green leather Gucci suitcase wide open and half emptied out atop the bed, an ornately carved, quilt-covered wooden four-poster. Freeboard hadn’t yet bothered to change her clothes and was still in her stonewashed shirt and jeans. Once arrived in the room she’d thought hody, God we’re here! We’re really doing it! It’s actually happening! We’re here! Manically energized and elated, she had only taken time to tug off her wet boots and pull on a dry pair of fluffy white woolen socks. She stopped pacing and wriggled her toes in them now as she listened to the ringing at the end of the line; hypnotically regular and low, it seemed distant, as if it were ringing in some other dimension. Freeboard took the phone from her ear and eyed it, frowning and squinting in consternation. She’d dialed her office and no one had answered. And then she’d redialed again and again. On this try she had counted more than fifty rings. She breathed “Christ!” and then clumped to an antique desk where she slammed the receiver down into its cradle. “It’s freaking impossible!” she vehemently murmured. Hands on her hips, she stared down at the phone, and for a moment the lamplights flickered and dimmed before surging back up to their former brightness. Freeboard peered around the room, her eyes slits, as she grittily murmured, “Don’t try that crap on me!”

  She heard a sound, a deep rapping from the wall beside the mirror. Expressionless, she shifted her glance to the spot.

  Through the wall came the voice of Dare, low and muffled:

  “Are you there?”

  “No.”

  “This wall sounds hollow to me.”

  “No shit.”

  “Does your room have any windows?”

  “What’s it to you?”

  “I feel smothered. And I keep hearing creaking sounds.”

  “Stop walking. It’s an old wooden floor.”

  “You have no heart, bitch.”

  “No.”

  There came a single loud rap from the other side.

  “This wall is definitely hollow,” worried Dare.

  Freeboard curled in her lips. Her eyes narrowed.

  “Goddamit, that’s just what I was afraid of!”

  Grimly, the Realtor strode out into the hallway and up to the door of the room next to hers, where she grasped the doorknob, threw the door open, walked in and loudly slammed the door shut behind her. “Listen here, Too Little, Too Latent,” she began.

  Dare flinched. He’d been standing with his ear to a wall, a round stone paperweight lifted in his hand. He was clad in a full-length white mink dressing gown.

  Freeboard strode across the room and confronted him.

  “Do you remember why we’re here?” she demanded.

  Dare looked down at her haughtily. “To break and enter?”

  “We are here to clear this fyooking house’s fyooking reputation!”

  Freeboard snatched the heavy paperweight out of Dare’s grasp.

  “Knock it off with this rapping and shit!” she warned him. “I thought you were a total nonbeliever!”

  “So I am. Can’t you see that I was teasing you, precious? And of course you took the bait like a well-famished trout.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  Dare drew himself up imperiously. “Rest your mind,” he said. “I am doubt.” Then he held out his upturned hand and demanded, “Now would you please be so kind as to return my lucky rock?”

  Freeboard hefted the weight. “Where do you want it?”

  “I’ve already set up cameras on timers here and there,” explained Case as he added more cream to his coffee. “Please don’t trip over them,” he cautioned with a smile. He was sitting at the end of an oblong table amid the remains of a savory brunch that had included a bacon-and-onion quiche, prawns sautéed in a coconut mustard sauce, varied jams and assorted pastries and breads. Croissant crumbs speckled the white linen tablecloth and no butter knife was unsmeared. At the opposite end of the table sat Dare, with Freeboard at an angle close beside him, while Trawley sat close to Gabriel Case. The psychic had changed into a gauzy turquoise dress and from her hair a scent of jasmine rose. “I’ve had all the phones turned on and all that,” continued Case. “If you’d like to make a note, the number’s 914–2121. Awfully easy to remember. In the meantime, as for now there isn’t anything for anyone to do except relax and be terribly observant; and, of course, report anything unusual to me.”

  The drumming of rain on mullioned windows looking out to a wood filled a momentary silence. Then Dare cleared his throat and looked at Case. “Have you ever caught a ghost on film?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “Well, that’s honest,” the author admitted. He nodded.

  Case sipped at his coffee and then set down his cup. It made a faint little pewtery sound against the saucer. “Mr. Dare,” he said, “I do hope you won’t take offense but I’m finding the mask a little bit of a distraction.”

  “Then perhaps you have Attention Deficit Disorder.”

  Dare wore a Phantom of the Opera mask.

  Freeboard reached over and ripped it from his face.

  “Thank you,” Dare quietly told her.

  “You’re welcome.”

  Freeboard folded her arms across her chest, looked away and shook her head with an exasperated sigh. From a pocket Dare produced a transistorized tape recorder. He set it before him on the table.

  “Dr. Case, do you mind if I record this?”

  “No, of course not. Good idea. Go right ahead.”

  The author slid a switch on the side of the recorder and a tiny red light flashed on. “There we are,” Dare announced. “You may fire when ready, Master Gridley.”

  Case put his arms on the table, leaning forward. “Do you all know the history of the house?” He scanned their faces.

  “No, I don’t,” said Trawley. Her voice was barely audible. All through the brunch she had hardly said a word, except in answer to a question about her trip and then another concerning a case she’d been involved in, the search for a missing child in Surrey. Mainly, she’d been fixedly staring at Case.

  “It was—”

  “Built by Dr. Quandt,” Dare finished over Case, “in the middle of the thirties for his beautiful wife, whom he came to believe was being grossly unfaithful, resulting in his promptly and savagely offing her.”

  “I see you’ve done your homework, Mr. Dare.”

  The author shrugged. “All I know is what Joanie has told me.”

  “Yes, Quandt was a violent man,” Case confirmed.

&nb
sp; “I’m not surprised,” answered Dare. “I think surgeons have violent natures, that’s the reason they go into that line of work: normal people couldn’t slice another person into bits and moments later eat a double Big Mac with fries.”

  “No, I agree.”

  “It’s rude,” added Dare.

  “So it is. However, Quandt was not a surgeon,” said Case. “He wasn’t?”

  “No, Quandt was a noted psychiatrist.”

  The author turned a frirnmled, cool look to the Realtor.

  Freeboard stared back at him defiantly. “So?”

  “Quandt was also maniacally jealous,” Case offered. “ ‘Physician heal thyself and all that. She was very much younger and he loved her intensely.”

  Dare turned back to him. “What was her name?”

  “Her name was Riga.” Case glanced up at Morna, who had entered from the kitchen and was quietly approaching him with a silver coffee server. As she lowered its spout to refill his cup, Case quickly covered it with his hand. “Oh, no, thank you, my dear. I’m fine.”

  He looked around. “Someone else?”

  “Yes, a little here, please,” requested Dare.

  Morna moved to his end of the table.

  “He met Riga at a music hall,” Case resumed. “She was a dancer. Her parents were Romanian immigrants, Gypsies. She was only sixteen.”

  “Yes, that’s young,” agreed Dare. He moistened the tip of his finger and placed it on top of a large croissant crumb, pressed gently down, and then lifted the fallen crumb into his mouth. Morna was leaning over his cup. “And so how did he kill her?” Dare asked.

  “Suffocation.”

  Dare emitted a yelp.

  Morna gasped, her hand clapped over her mouth. Somehow missing Dare’s cup, she had poured hot coffee onto his lap.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry!”

  Dare dabbed at the stain with his napkin.

  “It’s all right, love. I mean, really. Nothing to it. Not at all.”

  “You see, Morna?” said Case. “He forgives you.”

  She turned and met his odd, steady stare in silence; then she turned back away and uttered softly, “I know.” While she filled Dare’s cup, her green gaze lifted up and for one intense moment met and held Trawley’s.

  “We’re all fine here now, Morna,” Case told her.

  She nodded and moved off toward the kitchen.

  “Getting back to the history of the house,” resumed Case. He laid it out briefly: Built in 1937. Then in 1952 the murder of Riga and the death of Quandt himself minutes afterwards, apparently by his own hand. Ownership passed to a son, Regis Quandt, aged twelve when the tragedy occurred, and taken to live with Quandt’s brother, Michael. Regis died when he was only twenty, mansion ownership passed to Michael and then finally to Michael’s son, Paul Quandt. Meantime, the mansion had been put up for sale, but without success, and in 1954, and over the course of the next twenty years, was leased out any number of times, with the leases always broken through departure or death, including a period late in the fifties when the house had been occupied by a contemplative order of nuns who experienced an outbreak of “possession” hysteria reminiscent of three hundred years before among the nuns at the convent of Loudun in France. The nun in charge was found hanged from a wooden beam. “That was in 1958,” said Case. From then on, he explained, the house was unoccupied until 1984, when Paul Quandt, wealthy already from inheritance and now a historian of some note, moved in with his wife and three young children. Like others, they experienced the haunting phenomena, in particular deafening hangings on the outer walls. “And then there were other things …” said Case, his voice trailing off. He left it hanging. In 1987, he then recounted, the unnerving manifestations ceased, and so things remained until 1990, when the Quandts moved to Italy, decided they liked it there, and put the island and the mansion up for sale. But the house’s reputation had outlived its reign of peace.

  “So far,” ended Case, “the tragic words of this ghastly gospel.”

  “So it all goes back to the wife being suffocated,” said Dare.

  “That’s right,” agreed Case.

  “And so the wife is the ghost, is that the plot? Heavy breathing and moaning in the hallway at night? Perhaps the sound of someone tapping a pipe against his teeth?”

  Subtly, Freeboard’s middle finger lifted up in Dare’s direction.

  “I have no information that Quandt smoked a pipe, Mr. Dare,” said Case, looking mildly at sea.

  “Oh, you’re saying that it’s Quandt who haunts the place?”

  “Perhaps so.” Case reached out and plucked a chocolate from a small silver tray. “Most of the victims,” he imparted, “have been women.”

  Dare paled. “Victims? What victims? You mean dead people?”

  “Quite.”

  Freeboard sighed and then shifted in her chair.

  “Are we going to talk about this forever?”

  The Realtor’s eyes were glazed over with boredom.

  “And of course, all these women died of fright,” Dare said tightly.

  “Only one. Three were suicides,” said Case. “Two went insane.”

  The author turned his head and stared archly at Freeboard. “Some unscrupulous Realtor, no doubt, kept leasing the place to loonies and chronic depressives.”

  “Mr. Dare, you sound defensive to me,” observed Case. “Is it possible you secretly believe?”

  “The suspension of my disbelief would require more cables than the Golden Gate Bridge.”

  “Yeah, Dare is doubt,” Freeboard murmured, eyes hooded.

  “Precisely. But merely for the sake of my article,” said Dare, “even if there were such things as ghosts, why on earth don’t they beetle on along to their reward instead of drifting and clotting around the old clubhouse making thoroughgoing pains in the ass of themselves?” Case lifted an eyebrow. “Mrs. Trawley?”

  But the psychic mutely demurred, lowering her eyes and shaking her head before again looking up at a sound from Freeboard as the Realtor, with a heavy and impatient sigh, bowed down her head and closed her eyes; she’d awakened at approximately four that morning, after tossing and turning in a restless sleep. Case glanced at her un-readably, then turned to answer Dare. “Well, who knows?” he began. “But assume that when you die you’re convinced—as you are, I presume, Mr. Dare—that death is the end of all consciousness. And then you die, but you remain fully conscious, so that the moment immediately after death seems no different from the one that came before. So in that case would it really be so terribly odd if there were some of us who simply didn’t notice that we’re dead?”

  “I would notice,” Dare insisted.

  “Three months’ notice,” muttered Freeboard, half awake.

  “Joan, I’m marking you absent,” said Dare. He reached over and poked her in the side with a finger. Freeboard’s head snapped up and her eyes opened wide. “Yeah, what’s up?” she said, attempting to sound alert.

  “Dr. Case was just implying that ghosts are nonbelievers; a rather nice irony, that, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah, that’s great.”

  “Yes, I thought you might say that.”

  “Quit staring.”

  “I’m not staring.”

  “Yes, you are, Terry! Quit it!”

  “I will.”

  The author returned his attention to Case.

  “And so why wouldn’t some sympathetic angel just come and tell these spirits to wake up and smell the coffee?” he asked.

  “Good point. Perhaps they have to find it out for themselves.”

  “I think not knowing that you’re dead is shocking ignorance, frankly.”

  “Maybe ghosts can’t let go of their attachments,” said Case.

  “Lucky rocks,” mentioned Freeboard.

  Dare ignored it.

  Case turned to Trawley and stared at her intently. “I meant mainly emotional attachments. Don’t you think so, Mrs. Trawley? Or do you?”

  Trawley low
ered her eyes and shook her head. Softly, barely audibly, she said, “I don’t know.”

  “What precisely do you know?” Dare demanded. “What is it, in fact, that you do, Mrs. Trawley? You’re the quietest person I’ve ever met. Do you talk to the spirits, at least?”

  The noted psychic stood up. “You’ll excuse me just a moment?”

  “Yes, of course,” murmured Case. He looked embarrassed.

  “You didn’t say she was sensitive, you said a sensitive.”

  “Terry, you’re a hemorrhoid,” Freeboard told him quietly.

  “I’m just going for some water,” said the psychic, smiling thinly.

  She opened a door and disappeared into the kitchen.

  “I respect and adore you!” Dare called after her. “I kiss your ectoplasm.”

  “Shall we leave it at that, Mr. Dare?” Case suggested. Freeboard glared. “ ‘I am doubt’ could be ‘I am dead.’ ”

  In the kitchen, Trawley went to the double sink where Morna was standing washing dishes. “May I have a clean glass?” she asked. “I’d like some water.”

  Silently, the housekeeper rinsed her hands, dried them, then reached to the cupboard for a glass and began to fill it from the tap.

  Trawley was staring at her intently.

  “You’ve been with Dr. Case for many years?”

  “Many years.”

  Morna’s voice was colorless and quiet.

  She turned off the tap and handed Trawley the glass.

  “Such an awfully pleasant atmosphere to work in,” said the psychic. “Dr. Case lives near the campus, does he, Morna?”

  “Very near.”

  “And you?”

  “Very far.”

  Morna had returned to the washing of the dishes.

  “Oh, well, thank you for the water,” Trawley told her.

  “Yes.”

  For a moment Trawley stood there, silently staring, Then abruptly she turned and walked out of the kitchen, quietly closing the door behind her. Hearing the sound, Morna turned and looked after her with unreadable ice-green eyes.

  When Trawley retook her seat at the table, Case and Dare were still arguing over ghosts and Freeboard was again half asleep in her chair. “Dr. Case,” Dare was saying, “with all due respect to your learning and intelligence, am I gathering correctly that you’ve actually made up your mind that ghosts in fact exist?”