“I know it sounds…well crazy, but when we were in there, I swore I saw the two of them having a conversation.”
“The two of who?”
“Brenda and Kavi. I saw him speaking to her. Standing by her bed as though she was asking him questions and he was answering them.”
“Is that it?”
“I know how all of this must look. In Calcutta, the streets are brimming with Swamis and superstition. Must be an East Indian thing. But I assure you, Dr. Hunter, I’m a levelheaded, skeptical woman. I’m certainly not blind and when I see something that doesn’t add up, I need to understand it.”
“So it looked to you as though your son was speaking with Brenda.”
“In the car on the way home, he brought it up on his own. I never asked or prompted him in any way, he just came right out with it.”
Hunter had moved the coffee cup aside and was leaning in. “Tell me exactly what he said.”
“He said she asked for his name, said he looked an awful lot like his father did when he was young. Then she wanted to know where we lived. She asked for our address and when I heard that, that’s when I lost it.”
“And did Kavi give it to her?”
“Yes.”
“Has Kavi been demonstrating any unusual behavior since then?”
“Unusual?”
“Talking to himself, imaginary friends, nightmares…”
“That’s partly what I’m afraid of. It’s the reason I went to Sunnybrook in the first place. You see, my ex-husband’s been suffering from nightmares and insomnia for over six months now. Last week he joined a drug trial that was supposed to treat PTSD and he’s been acting strangely ever since. I’m afraid that whatever psychosis he might be suffering from…” Ruma’s voice trailed off. “I’m afraid Kavi might inherit it.”
“You said your husband’s nightmares started around six months ago.”
“Yes, in September.”
“Can you be more specific?” Hunter asked, taking her hands. “Think, it’s important.”
“Labor Day weekend. I remember because we were at my parents’ and on the Friday night Tyson came awake screaming. Scared the heck out of me. My parents never approved of him, they’re very old fashioned, and that night I’d just chocked it up to nerves.”
Hunter’s jaw slacked, his eyes staring off into empty space. “Labor Day fell on the sixth this year, didn’t it?”
“I believe so. Is that important?”
“I’m not sure, maybe. September sixth was the same day Brenda Barrett slipped into a coma.”
Chapter 27
Tyson punched the end call button on his cell phone with his thumb and swore. “Why isn’t she picking up?”
He and Judy barreled down Columbus Avenue going a fair bit over the speed limit. A black mini van pulled out suddenly and Judy gasped.
Tyson swerved narrowly avoiding it. Judy grimaced, clutching the passenger side handle.
“Slow down or you’re going to get us killed,” she said.
Tyson nudged his foot off the accelerator by a hair. Then he pulled out his cell phone and rang Skip.
“Skip, I need your help.”
“Tyson?” The concern in Skip’s voice was unmistakable.
“I need to get a hold of Ruma. I think she and Kavi may be in danger.”
“Ty, Kavi’s here with me.”
An inexplicable and blinding sting of jealousy suddenly gripped Tyson. “Is Ruma there too?”
“No, she’s meeting with someone. Asked me to watch Kavi for a while. I’m not great with kids, Ty, you probably know that better than anyone, but I gave him some chocolate ice cream and he seemed real happy after that. He’s sleeping in the other room now. He’s perfectly safe.”
“Yeah, chocolate ice cream’s his favorite. Skip, would you do me a favor and check to see that he’s all right?”
Skip paused for no longer than a second and it seemed to last ten minutes. “Sure,” he said.
“Thanks. Listen, don’t go anywhere, Skip. Judy and I will be over in a few minutes to pick him up.”
“Judy?” Tyson heard Skip start to ask, but he’d already hit the end call button and Skip’s voice floated away.
Tyson was a mess. His mind swirling madly. His hands shaking, his mouth pasty and dry. He was feeling like a junky again. But he never got a chance to take those caffeine pills that were still sitting on his kitchen counter. He knew the signs well enough to know he was about to come crashing down.
He pushed on the accelerator and flew across West Fifty-Seventh Street at record speed.
Judy looked over at him in the darkness. She was beautiful, and he could see that even through his peripheral vision. “I think it’s about time you told me what the hell is going on here,” she said. “You’re not some kind of drug dealer, are you?”
Tyson let out a nervous giggle. “I wish it were that simple.”
But Judy didn’t even crack a smile. “Why don’t you pull over at the corner here and let me out. I’ll take a cab home.”
“I don’t think that’s safe. That thing you saw at the apartment. I have a feeling it’s not just after me. It may have already killed the one person who could make all of this go away. If I’m right, there’s no telling who it’ll go after next. Look, I know it might not sound like much, but right now you’re all I have.”
“I’m flattered. Really I am. But an hour ago something frankly I don’t have words to describe was chasing us down the stairwell of your building. I can’t stop hearing it grunting. I feel like I’m stuck in a nightmare I can’t wake up from.”
“You are,” Tyson said without a moment’s hesitation. “You’re stuck in my nightmare.”
He could see her staring at him, as the lights from the oncoming traffic flickered across his face.
Tyson pulled the car to a stop before a red light. He was gripping the steering wheel with both hands.
That’s when he decided to tell Judy everything he knew. How it had started was perhaps the clearest thing of all. The nightmares. The months without sleep; the way his life had started falling apart. But it was everything after the Noxil he wasn’t so clear about. Those were the parts he was still piecing together himself. Finally, he broached the craziest sounding part of all; that people and things from his dreams were somehow finding their way into his waking life. That a doorway to another reality had swung open and he had no idea how to close it again. The only saving grace was that whatever came through didn’t seem to be able to stay for too long. Losing the million dollars and the Star Wars action figures he’d loved as a child had been proof positive of that.
“You know those drug commercials where they show you people running through the streets having the greatest day of their lives? And you have no idea what the commercial’s about until you see the picture of a pill or something.”
It looked like Judy was still trying to absorb everything Tyson had been telling her. “Yeah, what about them?”
“Well, right now I’m the schlep who ended up as one of those statistical anomalies they rush through at the tail end of the commercial. You know that last bit about ‘may increase the risk of cardiovascular problems, heart attack, ruptured spleen, and death.’ Maybe if I hadn’t been so rash I might have remembered the golden rule.”
“You mean do unto others…?”
“No. Nothing in life is free.”
• • •
“Where’s Judy?” Skip asked Tyson who was busy fidgeting with the pencil in his hand, wagging it between his fingers like the tail of dog, happy to see its owner.
“Down in the car,” Tyson said. “She had to make a phone call. Where’s Kavi?”
“Still sleeping.”
Tyson went to move past him, but Skip didn’t budge.
“You’ve put me in a real awkward spot here, Ty. What’s Ruma gonna say when she comes by to get him and I tell her ‘oh he’s gone with his daddy.’ You damn well know she’s gonna blow a gasket.”
“I wish
I had the time to explain everything right now, ol’ buddy, but if I don’t get out of here in the next few minutes, something’s gonna come waltzing through that door that’ll turn your hair white as snow. Keeping you as far away from Kavi and Ruma as I can is the only way to keep you safe.”
Skip stepped aside.
Tyson found Kavi snuggled in a tiny corner of Skip’s king-size bed. He shuddered at how young and vulnerable his son looked. When Tyson scooped him up, Kavi stirred in his arms.
“Mommy?”
“No, it’s Daddy. We’ll see Mommy soon enough.”
Skip was over by the living room window, looking out at something on the street down below. “I don’t know what you did to Judy up at the cottage, but she hasn’t been returning my calls lately.”
“I didn’t know you two had a thing.”
“We don’t,” Skip answered sheepishly, “but that wasn’t from lack of trying.”
“I guess she knows a real man when she sees one.”
Skip smiled. “I guess so. Give her my best, would you?”
“Will do. And lock this door after we leave and don’t open it for anyone you don’t know.”
Skip crossed his arms over his chest. “Tyson, you’re really starting to scare me.”
Tyson looked back at his friend. “Good.”
Chapter 28
Hunter was in his car, parked in front of Ruma’s house, and the only emotion he could feel was disgust. Disgust at himself for following her home, for acting like a two-bit stalker. The truth was he didn’t know why he had followed Ruma from the coffee shop. If a cop had tied him up to a lie detector and given him the third degree, he probably would have passed with flying colors.
“Why did you follow Ms. Chaudhuri home?”
“I don’t know.”
Long pause.
“Looks like he’s telling the truth.”
Maybe he wanted her address and didn’t think Bowes had stashed it anywhere in that junk heap he called an office. Or maybe there was something about a woman at the height of vulnerability that excited him.
Earlier tonight at the coffee shop, Ruma had been talking about her strange experience at Sunnybrook and nearly the entire time he had been fantasizing about tying her up and hurting her. Not sexually. No, it wasn’t quite the sex he was after, but something far more interesting. Far grander. Communion with God. Wasn’t that how Brenda had put it in one of those little journals of hers? But which God was he courting?
Hunter thought of that patient he had tortured with the needle and then of the Mexican woman in the phone booth and couldn’t help wondering what special kind of monster he was becoming.
Inside the house, Ruma was heading into the kitchen. She was…
• • •
…still reeling from the bombshell that Dr. Hunter had laid on her. But what could it mean? Ruma was fingering a scrap of paper. A note to herself. One of the few she had made during her meeting with Dr. Hunter. On it was a date: September sixth. And below that: “Tyson’s nightmares and Brenda’s coma. What are the odds that both started on the same day? Coincidence?”
The idea that Brenda might have something to do with it—her remote location and physical condition aside—had seemed like the kind of mumbo jumbo her own mother would often babble on about. Black magic, she called it. You couldn’t take a step through the streets of Calcutta without meeting someone who was dead certain they were being cursed. But here? In America?
That acute sense of unease had magnified as Dr. Hunter told her how Brenda’s brain waves were off the chart. She’d apparently always been an exceptionally intelligent woman, only now her readings were so far beyond that. But the biggest question that begged to be answered: how was Brenda’s coma connected to Tyson’s nightmares?
She had kept all this from Tyson because frankly, she wasn’t sure what she would find after visiting Sunnybrook and then today after meeting with Dr. Hunter. She knew now she couldn’t keep it from him any longer. He would be angry with her for going behind his back, but more importantly, he might be the only one who could make sense of what Dr. Hunter had told her.
Her attention shifted to the kitchen phone where the message light was blinking.
Ruma lifted the handset and dialed her retrieval code. That’s when her nose curled at the strange scent in the air.
Smells like… Christmas trees.
The woman from the phone company was asking her to hit one at about the same time that she saw the dead flies on the kitchen table. Ten of them. And they formed a perfect circle and Ruma felt that vague disquiet return in full force. The same one she’d felt in Brenda’s room the other day and again on the way home when Kavi had told her about the conversation he and Tyson’s comatose mother were having. The conversation where she had asked Kavi for their home address.
Seeing Kavi’s clear and smiling face in her mind’s eye made her heart skip a beat. She had been so preoccupied with meeting Dr. Hunter and then afterward with the consequences of what she’d learned, that she’d forgotten to pick Kavi up from Skips’ place.
She was about to hang up when the first message started playing. It was Tyson and he sounded out of breath.
“I’ve been trying to reach you for over an hour now, Ruma. You and Kavi could be in grave danger. I don’t have time to explain right now. Take Kavi to a motel and call me when you’re safe.”
Tyson’s next message nearly sent Ruma into hysterics.
“Kavi’s with me. I picked him up from Skip’s just now. Whatever you do, don’t go home.”
Ruma’s first inclination was to call Skip and give him the biggest bitch out session of his life. Her hands were trembling. She had entrusted Kavi to Skip and what had he done? Turned him over to the one man who might just be on the verge of losing his mind. And this by Skip’s own admission.
The piece of paper with Skip’s number on it was fastened to the fridge with an old Pizza Hut magnet.
She turned to grab it and that’s when she spotted something that made all the blood drain from her face.
It was coming up from the basement. A single paw—or was that a hand?—planted on the kitchen tile as though it were playing a game of statue and it was Ruma’s turn to close her eyes.
The Anderson’s pit bull from next door must have wandered in through an open basement window. That was her first thought. Except her basement didn’t have any windows and whatever was connected to that hand was no pit bull.
It emerged and Ruma screamed. The face staring back at her was human, albeit barely. Its skin looked gray and worn. Its lips were receded and corpselike, revealing a set of sharp looking teeth. But it was the long curving claws on the creature’s hands that made the greatest impression. She stood watching it with an acute look of horror smeared across her face. Ruma realized then she was in a world of trouble.
The creature was pulling the rest of itself into the kitchen with its long skinny arms and Ruma saw for the first time the reason for its strange form of locomotion. Where she had expected to see legs, the creature had only a compact and stubby tail and it moved from side to side.
Behind it was a thick trail of what looked like afterbirth. And as it came forward, she could see it sniffing at the air. Sniffing at her. Was it confirming it had the right person? A legless corpse. That’s what it looked like and she wanted to scream but somehow her mouth wouldn’t open.
The man thing was less than five feet away when she broke free from her paralysis and ran.
She could hear it then, behind her, breathing hard, almost grunting, as it scrabbled after her, claws clicking and scrapping against the hard brown tiles.
Ten feet from her front door was when she realized her mistake. East Harlem hadn’t been a dangerous place to live for years, but the worry wart in her had insisted that each of the front door’s three deadbolts be latched. Now that little obsession for safety was taking on a deadly and rather ironic new light since with the door so securely bolted shut, she knew she would never get it op
en in time. Ruma spun on her heels. There was a blur of motion as she came about and it took her panic stricken mind what felt like an eternity to realize that it had leapt in the air after her. She ducked and the creature went careening over her head.
There was a loud crash as the creature crashed head first into the door and collapsed to the ground. Ruma scurried to her feet and saw that it wasn’t moving. Its face was bleeding profusely, and she realized with a chill that its jaws had been open as it sailed through the air.
But it isn’t dead, she thought hysterically. It’s playing possum. Wants me to walk over there and pull it away from the door and that’s when it’ll strike.
A thick trail of what looked like cadaver blood oozed down the creature’s face.
Blood meant it could be hurt and hurt meant it could be killed. Ruma suddenly knew she had to find something hard to bash its brains in. She stumbled into the family room, numb from the waist down, her eyes scanning from left to right and seeing nothing. She stalked over to the fireplace and plucked up the black iron poker which sat resting against the hearth. It felt solid in her hands and more than well suited for the task.
Ruma was still weighing the poker in her hand when she became aware of the noise behind her. Long nails scuttling along the hard wood flood. She spun. Nothing was there. Even the small patch of hallway she could see was empty.
Her hand gripped tightly around the poker’s hard metal handle. She wanted to take a look in the hall, to see if it was still lying there, but a little voice inside told her it was gone.
There was a phone in the kitchen, the same one she had been about to use when she’d seen the thing coming out of the basement. But to reach it, she would have to cut through the hallway and once there she would be vulnerable. No, she would make a break for it and go across the street to the Henderson’s.
Heart pounding, Ruma crossed the room and stopped. The noise she heard was faint and hard to identify, but it seemed to be coming from Kavi’s room.
Dark Passage Page 15
