‘Excuse me?’
She said, ‘Come on. You’re tired, aren’t you?’
I thought: hallo – hooker. But she didn’t actually look like a hooker. She was dressed too plainly, and what hooker wears little pearl earrings and a little pearl brooch on her dress? She looked more like somebody’s mother.
I picked up my bag and followed her out of the Radisson and on to Lockwood. Although it was stormy, the night was still warm, and I could smell the ocean and that distinctive subtropical aroma of moss and mold. In the distance, lightning was crackling like electric hair.
The woman led me quickly along the street, walking two or three steps in front of me.
‘I don’t know what I owe the honor of this to,’ I said.
She half turned her head. ‘It’s easy to get lost. It’s not so easy to find out where you’re supposed to be going. Sometimes you need somebody to help you.’
‘OK,’ I said. I was totally baffled, but I was too damned tired to argue.
After about five minutes’ walking we reached the corner of Broad Street, in the city’s historic district. She pointed across the street at a row of old terraced houses, their stucco painted in faded pinks and primrose yellows and powder-blues, with the shadows of yucca trees dancing across the front of them. ‘That one,’ she said. ‘Mrs Woodward’s house. She takes in guests.’
‘That’s very nice of you, thank you.’
She hesitated, looking at me narrowly, as if she always wanted to remember me. Then she turned and started to walk away.
‘Hey!’ I called. ‘What can I do to thank you?’
She didn’t turn around. She walked into the shadows at the end of the next block and then she wasn’t there at all.
Mrs Woodward answered the door in hairpins and no make up and a flowery robe and I could tell that she wasn’t entirely thrilled about being woken up at nearly three a.m. by a tired and sweaty guy wanting a bed and a shower.
‘You were highly recommended,’ I said, trying to make her feel better.
‘Oh, yes? Well, you’d better come in, I suppose. But I’ve only the attic room remaining.’
‘I need someplace comfortable to sleep, that’s all.’
‘All right. You can sign the register in the morning.’
The house dated from the eighteenth century and was crowded with mahogany antiques and heavy, suffocating tapestries. In the hallway hung a gloomy oil portrait of a pointy-nosed man in a colonial navy uniform with a telescope under his arm. Mrs Woodward led me up three flights of tilting stairs and into a small bedroom with a sloping ceiling and a twinkling view of Charleston through the skylight.
I dropped my bag on the mat and sat down on the quilted bed. ‘This is great. I’d still be waiting to check into the Radisson if I hadn’t found this place.’
‘You want a cup of hot chocolate?’
‘No, no thanks. Don’t go to any trouble.’
‘Bathroom’s on the floor below. I’d appreciate it if you’d wait until the morning before you took a shower. The plumbing’s a little thunderous.’
I washed myself in the tiny basin under the eaves, and dried myself with a towel the size of a Kleenex while I looked out over the city. Although it was clear, the wind had risen almost to hurricane force and the draft seethed in through the crevices all around my window.
Eventually, ass-weary, I climbed into bed. There was a guide to the National Maritime Museum on the nightstand, and I tried to read it, but my left eye kept drooping. I switched off the light, bundled myself up in the quilt, and fell asleep.
‘Mommy, you can’t! Mommy, you can’t! Please, mommy, you can’t! NO MOMMY YOU CAN’T!’
I jerked up in bed and I was slathered in sweat. For a second I couldn’t think where I was, but then I heard the storm shuddering across the roof and the city lights of Charleston through the window. Jesus. Dreaming again. Dreaming about screaming. I eased myself out of bed and went to fill my toothbrush glass with water. Jesus.
I was filling up my glass a second time when I heard the child screaming again. ‘No, mommy, don’t! No mommy you can’t! PLEASE NO MOMMY PLEASE!’
I switched on the light. There was a small antique mirror on the bureau, so small that I could only see my eyes in it. The boy was screaming, I could hear him. This wasn’t any dream. This wasn’t any hallucination. I could hear him, and he was screaming from the house next door. Either this was real, or else I was suffering from schizophrenia, which is when you can genuinely hear people talking and screaming on the other side of walls. But when you’re suffering from schizophrenia, you don’t think, ‘I could be suffering from schizophrenia.’ You believe it’s real. And the difference was, I knew this was real.
‘Mommy no mommy no mommy you can’t please don’t please don’t please.’
I dressed, and he was still screaming and pleading while I laced up my shoes. Very carefully, I opened the door of my attic bedroom and started to creep downstairs. Those stairs sounded like the Hallelujah chorus, every one of them creaking and squeaking in harmony. At last I reached the hall, where a long-case clock was ticking our lives away beat by beat.
Outside, on Broad Street, the wind was buffeting and blustering and there was nobody around. I made my way to the house next door, and there it was, with its hooded porch and its damp-stained rendering, narrow and dark and telling me nothing.
I stood and stared at it, my hair lifted by the wind. This time I wasn’t going to try ringing the doorbells, and I wasn’t going to try to force my way inside. This house had a secret and the secret was meant especially for me, even if it didn’t want me to know it.
I went back to Mrs Woodward’s, locking the street door behind me. As quickly and as quietly as I could, I climbed the stairs to my attic bedroom. I thought at first that the boy might have stopped screaming, but as I went to the window I heard a piercing shriek.
The window frame was old and rotten and it was badly swollen with the rain and the subtropical humidity. I tried to push it open with my hand but in the end I had to take my shoulder to it, and two of the panes snapped. All the same I managed to swing it wide open and latch it, and then I climbed up on to the bureau and carefully maneuvered myself on to the roof. Christ, not as young as I used to be. The wind was so strong that I was almost swept off, especially since it came in violent, unexpected gusts. The chimney stacks were howling and the TV antenna was having an epileptic fit.
I edged my way along the parapet to the roof of the house next door. There was no doubt that it was the same house, the hooded-porch house, because it was covered with nineteenth-century slates and it didn’t have a colonial-style parapet. I didn’t even question the logic of how it had come to be here, in the center of historic Charleston. I was too concerned with not falling seventy-five feet into the garden. The noise of the storm was deafening, and lightning was still crackling in the distance, over toward Charles Towne Landing, but the boy kept on screaming and begging and now I knew that I was very close.
There was a skylight in the center of the next-door roof, and it was brightly lit. I wedged my right foot into the rain gutter, then my left, and crawled crabwise toward it, keeping myself pressed close to the slates in case a sudden whirlwind lifted me away.
‘Mommy you can’t! Please mommy no! NO MOMMY YOU CAN’T YOU CAN’T!’
Grunting with effort, I reached the skylight. I wiped the rain away with my hand and peered down into the room below.
It was a kitchen, with a green linoleum floor and a cream-and-green painted hutch. On the right-hand side stood a heavy 1950s-style gas range, and just below me there were tables and chairs, also painted cream and green. Two of the chairs had been knocked over, as well as a child’s high-chair.
At first there was nobody in sight, in spite of the screaming, but then a young boy suddenly appeared. He was about five or six years old, wearing faded blue pajamas, and his face was scarlet with crying and distress. A second later, a woman in a cheap pink dress came into view, her hair in
wild disarray, carrying a struggling child in her arms. The child was no more than eighteen months old, a girl, and she was naked and bruised.
The woman was shouting something, very harshly. The boy in the blue pajamas danced around her, still screaming and catching at her dress.
‘No, mommy! You can’t! You can’t! No mommy you can’t!’
His voice rose to a shriek, and he jumped up and tried to pull the little girl out of his mother’s arms. But the woman swung her arm and slapped him so hard that he tumbled over one of the fallen chairs and knocked his head against the table.
Now the mother opened the oven door. Even from where I was clinging on to the roof I could see that the gas was lit. She knelt down in front of the oven and held the screaming, thrashing child toward it.
‘No!’ I shouted, thumping on the skylight. ‘No you can’t do that! No!’
The woman didn’t hear me, or didn’t want to hear me. She hesitated for a long moment, and then she forced the little girl into the oven. The little girl thrashed and screamed, but the woman crammed her arms and legs inside and slammed the door.
I was in total shock. I couldn’t believe what I had seen. The woman stood up, staggered, and backed away from the range, running one hand distractedly through her hair. The boy got up, too, and stood beside her. He had stopped screaming now. He just stared at the oven door, shivering, his face as white as paper.
‘Open the oven!’ I yelled. ‘Open the oven! For God’s sake, open it!’
The woman still took no notice but the boy looked up at me as if he couldn’t understand where all the shouting and thumping was coming from.
As soon as he looked up, I recognized him. He was the boy in the photograph that had stood on my grandmother’s mantelpiece.
He was me.
I don’t know how I managed to get down from that roof without killing myself. It took me almost five minutes of sweating and grunting, and at one point I felt the guttering start to give way. In the end, however, I managed to get back to the comparative safety of Mrs Woodward’s parapet, and climb back in through my attic window.
I limped downstairs and into the street, but I guess I knew all along what I would find there. The house next door was a flat-fronted, three-story dwelling, painted yellow, with a white door and the date 1784 over the lintel. The house with the hooded porch had gone, although God alone knew where, or how.
Three weeks later, when I was back in Fort Lauderdale, working at The Scorpion Lounge, I received a package of photographs and letters from my grandmother’s attorneys.
‘Your late grandmother’s legacy will be settled within the next three months. Meanwhile we thought you would like to have her various papers.’
I opened them up that evening, on the veranda of my rented cottage on Sunview Street. Most of the letters were routine – thank-you notes from children and cousins, bills from plumbers and carpet fitters. But then I came across a letter from my dad, dated twenty-six years ago, and handwritten, which was very unusual for him.
Dear Margaret,
It’s very difficult for me to write to you this way because Ellie is your daughter and obviously you feel protective toward her. I know you don’t think much of me for walking out on her and the kids but believe me I didn’t know what else to do.
I talked to her on the phone last night and I’m very concerned about her state of mind. She’s talking about little Janie being sent from hell to make her life a misery by crying and crying and never stopping and always wetting the bed. I don’t think the Ellie I know would hurt her children intentionally but she doesn’t sound like herself at all.
Please can I ask you to call around and talk to her and make sure that everything’s OK. I wouldn’t ask you this in the normal way of things as you know but I am very anxious.
All the best,
Travers.
Fastened to this letter by a paper clip was a yellowed cutting from the Chicago Sun-Times, dated eleven days later. MOTHER ROASTS BABY. Underneath the banner headline there was a photograph of the house with the hooded porch, and another photograph of the woman who had pushed her child into the oven. It was the same woman who had guided me from the Radisson Hotel to Mrs Woodward’s lodging house. It was my mother.
There was also a cutting from the Tribune, with another photograph of my mother, with me standing beside her, and a little curly-headed girl sitting on her lap. ‘Eleanor Parker with baby Jane and son five-year-old son James, who witnessed the tragedy.’
Finally, there was a neatly typed letter to my grandparents from Dr Abraham Lowenstein, head of the Psychiatric Department at St Vincent’s Memorial Hospital. It read:
Dear Mr and Mrs Harman,
We have concluded our psychiatric examination of your grandson James. All of our specialists are of the same opinion: that the shock he suffered from witnessing the death of his sister has caused him to suffer selective amnesia, which is likely to last for the rest of his life.
‘In lay terms, selective amnesia is a way in which the mind protects itself from experiences that are too damaging to be coped with by the usual processes of grieving and emotional closure. It is our belief that further treatment will be of little practical effect and will only expose James to unnecessary anxiety and stress.
So it was true. People can forget terrible experiences, totally, as if they never happened at all. But what Dr Lowenstein couldn’t explain was how the experience itself could come looking for the person who had forgotten it – trying to remind them of what had happened – as if it needed to be remembered.
Or why I shall never give Wendiii her crucifix back, because I still wake up in the night, hearing a young boy screaming, ‘No, mommy, you can’t! No, mommy, please, you can’t! NO MOMMY YOU CAN’T!’ And I have to have something to hold on to.
Son of Beast
Helen dropped her pink toweling bathrobe on to the floor and was just about to step into the shower when her cellphone played I Say A Little Prayer.
She said, ‘Shit.’ She was tired and aching after sitting in her car all night on the corner of Grear Alley, waiting for a rape suspect who had never appeared. But the tune played over and over and she knew that the caller wasn’t going to leave her alone until she answered. She picked up the cellphone from the top of the laundry basket and said, wearily, ‘Foxley.’
‘Did I wake you?’ asked Klaus.
‘Wake me? I haven’t even managed to crawl into bed yet.’
‘Sorry, but Melville wants you down here asap. Hausman’s All-Day Diner on East Eighth Street. It looks like Son of Beast has been at it again.’
‘Oh, shit.’
‘Yeah. My feelings exactly.’
She parked her red metallic Pontiac Sunfire on the opposite side of East Eighth Street and crossed the road through the whirling snow. It was bitterly cold and she wished that she had remembered her gloves. As she approached the diner, she shook down the hood of her dark blue duffel-coat so that the two cops in the doorway could see who she was.
Klaus Geiger was already there, talking to the owner. Klaus was big and wide shouldered, so that he looked more like a linebacker for the Bengals, rather than a detective. His dirty-blond hair was all mussed up, and there were plum-colored circles under his eyes, as if he hadn’t slept, either.
‘You look like you haven’t slept either,’ said Helen.
‘I didn’t. Greta’s cutting two new teeth.’
‘The joys of parenthood, right?’
Klaus turned to the owner and said, ‘Mr Hausman, this is Detective Foxley, from the Personal Crimes Unit. Mr Hausman came to open up this morning about a quarter of six and found the back door had been forced.’
The owner took off his eyeglasses and rubbed them with a crumpled paper napkin. He was balding, mid-fifties, with skin the color of liverwurst and a large mole on the left side of his chin. ‘I don’t know how anybody could do a thing like that. It’s like killing two people both at once. It’s terrible.’
Without a word, Hel
en went over to the young woman’s body. She was lying on her back with her head between two bar stools. Her black woolen dress had been dragged right up to her armpits and although she was still wearing a black lacey bra, her panties were missing. Her head had been wrapped around with several layers of cling wrap, so that her eyes stared out like a koi carp just beneath the surface of a frozen pond.
Like all of the nine previous victims, she was heavily pregnant – seven or eight months. A photographer was taking pictures of her from every angle, while a crime-scenes specialist in a white Tyvek suit was kneeling down beside her. He almost looked as if he were praying, but he was using a cotton bud to take fluid samples.
The intermittent flashing of the camera made the young woman’s body appear to jump, as if she were still alive. Helen bent over her. As far as she could tell without unwrapping her head, she was young, and quite pretty, with freckles and short brunette hair.
‘Do we know who she was?’ asked Helen.
‘Karen Marie Dozier,’ Klaus told her. ‘Age twenty-four. Her library card gives her address as Indian Hills Avenue, St Bernard.’
There was no need to ask if the young woman had been sexually assaulted. There were purple finger-bruises all over her thighs, and her swollen vagina was overflowing with blood-streaked semen.
Klaus said, ‘Same MO as all the others. And the same damn calling-card.’
He held up a plastic evidence envelope. Inside was a ticket for Son of Beast, the huge wooden roller-coaster at King’s Island pleasure park, over two hundred feet high and seven thousand feet long, with passenger cars that traveled at nearly eighty miles an hour. Helen had tried it only once, and she had felt as sick to her stomach as she did this morning.
‘That’s nine,’ said Colonel Melville. ‘Nine pregnant women raped and suffocated in sixteenth months. Nine.
He paused, and he was breathing so furiously that he was whistling through his left nostril.
Festival of Fear Page 21
