House Haunted

by Al Sarrantonio

  Falconi looked at Brennan levelly. He threw up his hands, leaning back in his chair. “Say whatever you want.”

  Brennan took his cue. He flipped past the pencil drawing of the young girl to the second page of the journal. On it, in thick crayon, was scribbled, “I love her.”

  “The boy who completed this,” Brennan said, flipping through the journal randomly, “Jeffrey Ragani, is talking about the same Bridget that Gary Gaimes is. It's the same Bridget that a girl named Laura Hutchins became obsessed with while staying in the apartment that Jeffrey Ragani died in at the hands of his mother. Laura Hutchins was Jeffrey Ragani's cousin. She was only there five days before she seemingly went out of her mind, killed her boyfriend who had come up to see her, and stole his car. Her whereabouts are unknown.”

  Brennan told Falconi about Beauvaque, told him where to get in touch with the landlord. “He'll verify everything I've told you about Laura Hutchins and Jeffrey Ragani.”

  Falconi fingered the pages of the notebook, looked at the scrawls of professed love, the primitive love poems. He knew obsession when he saw it.

  Brennan jerked the notebook away from Falconi, began flipping furiously through it to the back, stopping at a few spots on the way, pointing out the word “Mother” to Falconi. Brennan settled on a page near the end. On it were the words, “Will meet her at the house.”

  Falconi read them. “So?”

  “Jeffrey Ragani was talking about Bridget.”

  “What house?” Falconi said.

  Brennan leaned across the desk, hands on the notebook, and said, “That's what I have to get Gary Gaimes to tell me.”

  “Dr. Brennan,” Falconi said, “will you please get to the point?”

  Brennan turned to the last page of the notebook.

  “I doubt you've ever heard of this,” Brennan said. “On the paper, in almost architectural precision—Jeffrey Ragani had proved poor in penmanship but excellent in draftsmanship—was an almost symmetrical cross. It resembled the German Iron Cross, only the spokes were much thinner. Above each spoke was sketched a point of the compass—N for north, S, E, and W. At the hub of the cross was a representation of a dragon with its mouth open, long tongue lashing. It's called the Compass Cross. It's also known as the Cross of Charlemagne.”

  Falconi had settled back in his chair. “Go on.”

  “Charlemagne died in 814 A.D. Some said there was a cross fashioned for Charlemagne by an evil priest named Salomagni, and actually placed in his hand. The story is probably apocryphal. These things always gain embellishment every time they're written down or translated.

  “The Compass Cross was a house that, viewed from above, was shaped like a cross, on land owned by Charlemagne's heirs.

  “In 990 A.D. the house was destroyed. There is a prime source, a French priest named Verges, who swears he got the story from the only survivor's mouth, on her deathbed, during her confession. The woman, whose name was Genevieve, gave him permission to publish the story. Verges believed her. Not only that, but he returned to the place where the house stood and studied the ruins himself.”

  Falconi, resigned to the fact that Brennan hadn't gotten to the point yet, waved him on.

  “The reason Verges is so believable is that he wasn't a fool. He was a scientist and skeptic. He never fooled with heresy, but he insisted on seeing with his own eyes whatever could be seen. There's a quote in his work that, loosely translated, says, 'If it be, let me touch it, if it breathe, let me hear its breath, if it walk in shadows, let me throw light upon it. For all that God, Almighty Creator, has made He has made for Man to look upon, and all that is not of God Himself, to touch, and hear, and see.'

  “What he described, in physical terms, was what we would now call a classic poltergeist encounter. Or rather the aftermath of one. As he walked among the ruins of the house he described feelings of dread, unaccountable loss, of rage. Standing on one spot, he says there was a definite drop in temperature; not believing this possible, or doubting his own senses, he had the townsperson who he had hired—at great expense, for the town had become deathly afraid of the place—to blindfold him and lead him randomly from room to room in the ruins of the house. When he reached the cold spot, he says he knew it instantly, and drew off his blindfold to find himself standing at the exact location he had been earlier.

  “All of this makes a nice ghost story, until you consider what the dying penitent, in the sacredness of confession, told Verges had taken place in the house. Genevieve was originally from Trieste. She had been lured to France, so she said, by a handsome man named Paul, who promised to become her husband. Paul had made her the promise when she was fourteen, when she had visited a series of caves that the locals claimed were haunted. Her friends had run away, but she had stayed behind to behold the vision of this handsome man. Paul said he would love her always, and that someday he would marry her.

  “She ran from the cave, but periodically she was visited by Paul, who continued to profess his love. By her own admission, she was a homely girl, and on her deathbed, she confessed to the sin of lust.

  “When Genevieve was nineteen, Paul appeared to her while she was working in the fields and said she must come to him now. She immediately set out for France.

  “She found the house occupied by two men and a girl. One of the men was from Nantes, in western France, the other from Brussels. The woman was from a town north of Barcelona.

  “What followed was madness. As much of it that Verges describes, I get the feeling that he left as much out. It was obvious some of it Verges found unspeakable, blasphemous, or just distasteful.

  “All four of them, one from the north, one from the south, one from the east, and one from the west, had been lured there, either with promises of love—Verges hints at but never states that one of the men was homosexual—or mothering—the Spanish girl was only nine years old, an orphan; one of the men, a boy of seventeen, had lost his mother only six months before. All of them had had initial contact with Paul in a place considered inhabited by spirits.

  “None were able to leave the house once they were inside. Genevieve described a kind of lassitude she and the others felt, as if they were caught in amber. Genevieve described not being able to think clearly, and what thoughts she had were focused and concentrated on the obsession that had brought her to the house. The others, she said, acted the same way, as if they had been caught in a web, stung with spider's venom, and were waiting for the inevitable end. She described visions, mass hysteria, hallucinations. There is a strong hint of sexual degradation. You get the feeling Genevieve told him everything in detail; you can read between the lines and pretty much reconstruct what happened. Verges knew how much he could get away with telling. Despite his own prejudices, he worded things in such a way that the truth could be deduced.

  “Genevieve described to Verges, in detail, her participation in the dismemberment of the young girl, along with the faintest hint—again, Verges is circumspect—of cannibalism.

  “Only Genevieve survived. She found herself holding out her hands to an apparition of Paul displaying himself on their marriage bed, beckoning her to come forward and consummate their union. A crack of summer lightning illuminated the hall at that moment, and Genevieve looked straight into her reflection in a window. She saw that, in reality, she was standing on a bench in the entry hall of the house, covered in the blood and entrails of the others, a length of hemp around her neck knotted to a beam above.

  “With the disappearance of the lightning, the hallucination of Paul returned. Then a second bolt of lightning followed. This one, miraculously, hit the house, which caught fire. Genevieve, screaming, pulled the rope from her neck, threw herself through the flames, and escaped to the outside world.”

  Brennan looked hard at Falconi. “There were certain things, purely physical things, that Paul could not do. He could not bring food to the house, for instance. For this, Paul had recruited an assistant, a man from the nearby village, who was later hanged as a witch.”


  Brennan leaned forward. “That's what Gary Gaimes is, Lieutenant. An assistant. Somewhere in New York State, there's another Compass Cross. Gary Gaimes knows where it is. This time the spirit's name is Bridget, and Laura Hutchins is one of the four people she's summoned.”

  Falconi looked at Brennan. “Is that your fucking point?”

  “Don't get angry,” Brennan said. “I told you I didn't have time to prepare—”

  “That's what this is all about? Evil spirits?”

  Brennan fumbled his cigarette out of his pocket, lit it, took a deep pull. Falconi scowled.

  “There's more.”

  Falconi continued to scowl;

  Brennan butted the cigarette out. He leaned forward intensely, hands on Falconi's desk. “Genevieve confessed to Father Verges that in the midst of all the horrors taking place, Paul claimed that when the four of them had died in the house, he would be able to come over from the other side in his true arm. The human image he displayed to them was the possessed spirit of someone named Paul who had been driven to his death in the Compass Cross. This thing said it would destroy the world. And as Genevieve fled the house, it promised it would return in a thousand years—”

  “I've had enough of this—” Falconi said, beginning to rise from his chair.

  Brennan leaned back, took out his cigarette pack, removed a fresh cigarette, and lit it. This time he ignored Falconi's black look. He let the smoke fill his lungs, blew it out. “Bridget is real, Lieutenant. Whoever she is, she's the most unfortunate one of all in this, because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. In a way, she hasn't even been allowed to die. This thing on the other side has been using her.

  “Lieutenant, something has been guiding me toward the Compass Cross. Something beyond my own mind. It guided me to Father Verges's work four years ago, and it's been trying to make me find the Compass Cross ever since. I don't know how to explain it, it's not rational, but this force is there and it's been growing stronger in my mind.

  “Ten years ago, when I was an intern, I had a schizophrenic patient die on me, then come back. A classic near-death experience. She described the standard womb analogy, the tunnel, the bright light at the end. Then she described something after it. A place. She was dead when she was in this place. A day later, she couldn't even remember dying and was as mentally incapacitated as ever. But for that brief time, after she came back, she was more lucid than I had ever seen her.

  “At the time I thought nothing of it. But now I believe that place is real. And something bad is trying to get here from it. I've been guided to the Compass Cross, and now, suddenly, I'm sitting right on top of it. Gary Gaimes won't tell me where the house is, but he told me there were four people in it now. Bridget—whatever is using her—set its traps, and now they're sprung. I don't know what that thing is—the boogeyman, Satan, the Three Stooges’ little sister—but if those four people die in that house, you're going to have more problems on your hands than a serial killer named Gary Gaimes—”

  Falconi noticed a florid-faced, uniformed cop with a blond mustache and thin receding hairline standing in the doorway of his glassed-in office.

  “What is it, Guinty?”

  Detective Guinty stood mute.

  “Well?” Falconi bellowed.

  “Gary Gaimes, sir.”

  “What about him?”

  Guinty looked like he'd rather be anywhere else on earth. “He's gone, Lieutenant. He overpowered Martin while he was being fed. Cut him up with a sharpened spoon. Must have been working on it since his first meal—”

  “Jesus!” Falconi roared. He stalked around his desk, pausing to glare murderously at Guinty before stomping into the hallway. He stopped, turned on his heel, and regarded Brennan. His voice came out with controlled fury.

  “If I went by my gut now,” he said, “you'd be a dead man. God knows what kind of shit you filled Gaimes's brain up with. I personally tracked this fucker for eight weeks, losing sleep every night, spending time away from my kid, my wife, just to suck him off the streets so he wouldn't slice anybody else up because his sick little mind told him to. I'd be willing to believe just about anything about him—that his old man put his head in a vise when he was five, his mother stuck lit cigarettes on his testicles, his neighbors came over every Friday and did things to him your average S and M nut wouldn't even know about. I'd believe anything, because his mind is twisted and that's why he did the things he did. I'd be willing to listen to anything about Gary Gaimes, because I'm interested in what turned him into the sick dog he is. If we find that out, maybe we can stop somebody else from becoming a sick dog and slicing people up because they think it's the correct thing to do.” His face was scarlet with anger; he brought his index finger up to point at Brennan, then brought himself under control and lowered it. “I would love to believe you, Dr. Brennan. To know that there was some other place beyond death, that all of the pain and hate and murder, all the sick shit I see every day was just a prelude to something else, something better—well, that would almost make it all worthwhile. I would have to say it would make me happy. But I'm sorry. I have to draw the line somewhere. And believing this creep Gary Gaimes is girl Friday for some monster from beyond the grave is just not something I'm prepared to do.”

  Brennan crushed out his cigarette and began to gather his material into his briefcase. “If you don't help me, Lieutenant,” he said, “you'll be one sorry asshole.”

  Falconi raised his index finger again, thought better of it, gave Brennan a baleful stare before stomping off down the hallway, shouting, “Minkowski!”

  20. THE SOVIETS

  Viktor Borodin never tired of America. What he tired of was fools. And, it seemed that in America there were so many fools. It only made his job more difficult.

  Today, though, he was forced to admit, The fool is our own.

  In fact, he had rather enjoyed the report. Couched in hysterical terms, syntax that in the old days, perhaps even during Brezhnev's reign, would have stricken icy fear into the heart of any bureaucrat unlucky enough to have it land on his desk, the report was, in these new days, these days of perestroika, of glasnost, taken very seriously by Borodin. But he had also allowed himself to see the comical side of it. It was almost like French farce. Here was this third-rate Pole, sequestered in an underground detention camp near Treblinka that some idiot in Warsaw had decided to set up to study ardent Solidarity supporters, in order to come up with some way to break their spirit—and the union's—and it turns out this fellow was not the man the officials thought he was and should not have been taken to begin with! And not only that, here was this fellow, this Polack, after one month of nearisolation, mental torture, and physical abuse, not only escaping his detention, but murdering the camp commandant (another stupid Polack) and, not so funny, his visiting Soviet liaison. Then—and this was the most farcical of all—this crazy man takes the liaison's clothes, matches his mannerisms and voice, rides his limousine to the Krakow airport, where he boards an Aeroflot jet, flies to New York, and, rather than stopping in for a chat at the embassy in Riverdale, has the waiting limousine driver drop him at a private residence in upstate New York.

  Beautiful, just beautiful. Funny as hell.

  But, again, not all that funny.

  Viktor could afford to laugh, and openly, because he knew that in a day or two he would have this Polish whelp by the collar, singing like a whippoorwill, stripped of his stolen clothes, and on his way to Moscow.

  But there were other KGB agents who were not laughing, because the Soviet attach~ had apparently been wearing an Italian suit, something he should not have been able to afford. There were all kinds of allegations, from bribery to spying, which also gave Borodin a hearty belly laugh, because all of Liukin's men at home—and Viktor, from this distance, thought of them as his dear, dear brothers in arms who had the bad luck to deal with bad Russian plumbing, rotten Russian food, terrible Russian television, atrocious movies, despicable weather, ugly women—were shaking in their bo
ots.

  Yes, he loved America.

  Except for the fools.

  Viktor tapped on the glass partition; his driver slid the small window back and cocked his ear. “Drive slowly for a little while, Mikhail. This is the nicest part of the Hudson Valley in the fall.” As an afterthought, for fun, he added, “Don't you agree?” He watched as Mikhail, a proper public servant, nodded briskly to the order, but ignored, and properly so, the intimacy, the invitation to opinion. “Just drive,” Viktor said heartily, and Mikhail, nodding briskly, at once shut the opaque window and slowed the car five miles an hour.

  This was a lovely part of the country. One of the pleasures Viktor had allowed himself was reading Washington Irving, the short story writer and essayist, who had described this area of New York so perfectly. Viktor doubted that, at least at certain times of the year such as high autumn and June, there was a more beautiful spot in all of the United States. He had been stationed many places before coming to New York, and he had never seen the kind of foliage he was witnessing now: long vast valleys sloping off the Taconic Parkway to the near horizon, trees in blinding reds and yellows broken only by the occasional dairy barn or silo. He considered telling Mikhail to pull into one of the turnouts they were passing at regular intervals, so that he could get out of the car and feel, away from the confines of the automobile, the true sweep of the autumn vista. But that was not something he could do in laughter, because Mikhail, who watched him as surely as Viktor watched everyone else, would be safe to report that Viktor Borodin had not only taken it upon himself to slow his car down but wasted more time away from the business of the state by actually stopping the car to enjoy a frivolous view.