Bloodless

by Douglas Preston

  “Sit down here, across from me, and let me get you some fresh napkins,” she said.

  “Oh, ma’am,” the middle-aged woman replied as she wiped the back of her hand across her starched serving apron, “we couldn’t do any such thing.”

  “Nonsense,” said Constance, practically steering them into the other chairs at her table. “I wouldn’t think of leaving until I’ve made this right.”

  Both women sat down protesting, but with decreasing sincerity as Constance—moving with far less clumsiness than a moment before—brought over a large number of cloth napkins and a pitcher full of ice water.

  “You just use all the napkins you need, now,” Constance said, doing her best to parrot the speech patterns she’d heard other patrons use.

  “But, ma’am,” said the younger, “there’ll be trouble if Mr. Drinkman—”

  “If he should come in, there won’t be any trouble once I’ve spoken to him.”

  The younger one’s eyes brightened. “Oh, so you’re a VIP guest?”

  Constance smiled and waved a dismissive hand, saying nothing but implying everything. As the conversation continued, after a bit of shrewd name dropping, thanks to the crossword puzzle, Constance had both of them on an informal basis—Helen and Joan.

  “I won’t keep you,” Constance said after the cleanup was finished. “I know how busy you must be, with Pat Ellerby drowned…not to mention the shock of it all. And everyone being questioned by the police.”

  “Now, that’s the situation and the box it came in,” said Helen, nodding vigorously.

  “Just between the three of us, do you think Mr. Drinkman is up to the task?” Constance said. “Pat never said much about him.”

  “So you knew Mr. Ellerby?” Joan, the younger waitress, asked.

  Constance nodded with a sorrowful look.

  “Mr. Drinkman is trying hard,” Joan said. “But he’s got his work cut out for him, getting up to speed. Mr. Ellerby kept to himself, didn’t explain much about how things worked around here. Especially when it came to her.”

  “Her?”

  Joan cast her eyes up. “Miss Frost. He was very…protective of her.”

  “More like she was very possessive of him.” Helen poured more water on a napkin and made a final dab at her sleeve. “It’s been a hot mess, I can tell you. Some guests got so spooked they left. Others have come running like ants to a picnic, especially with that vampire talk starting up again.” The waitresses exchanged a significant look. “And here’s Mr. Drinkman, busier than a one-legged man at an ass-kicking contest. You’ll excuse me, ma’am.”

  “I heard Pat Ellerby was missing for a day before they found his body,” Constance said.

  Both waitresses nodded. “He took his cigarette breaks in the square, but never at a set time. Often he’d disappear, just like that.” Helen snapped her fingers. “One minute he’d be reading the financial pages of the paper, and the next he’d have run off and shut himself up in that room of his.”

  “What room?” Constance asked.

  “He has a room at the foot of the basement stairs he keeps to himself,” said Joan. “Uses it for stock trading and that sort of thing. ‘Playing the market’ is what he called it. It was his passion, that’s for sure. And…” She paused a second. “Well, I think he was starting to get awful good at it.”

  “How do you know?” Constance asked.

  “These last few months, he’s bought himself some things. A new truck—a King Ranch, no less. And a fancy watch.”

  “Joan!” Helen said reprovingly.

  “How do you know they weren’t gifts from Miss Frost?”

  “She isn’t the kind to pass out gifts,” Helen said.

  “But Ellerby was one of her favorites?” Constance asked.

  “He was the favorite,” Joan said. “But that didn’t make him an exception to her temper. Why, just a few nights back, she appeared out of nowhere, in the lobby—first time I’d seen her out in public in a year or two at least—and she headed on down to Ellerby’s basement office when he was out. So much for her being so weak and frail she can’t even leave her rooms! And, Lord sakes, you should have heard the argument upstairs later, when he came back! It sounded like an entire warehouse full of china was being smashed.”

  The waitresses’ eyes sparkled at this schadenfreude-laced memory.

  “When was this?” Constance asked casually.

  “Let’s see…” Joan thought a moment. “That was the night before Mr. Ellerby disappeared. No…two nights before.”

  Constance wondered if Frost was angry because she’d caught Ellerby skimming from hotel profits. “But until you saw her in the lobby, you thought she was too weak to leave her rooms?”

  The two waitresses exchanged glances again. “Well, that’s what we’ve been told,” Helen said. Despite her volubility, Constance noticed that something about this question made her choose her words more carefully. “Especially these last couple of years.”

  “Is she ill?”

  “She’s…eccentric, like. And the older she got, the more she depended on Mr. Ellerby. He arranged all her meals, her cleaning and linens, doctor’s visits. He would go up there and read her poetry and listen to her play the piano. Classical.”

  “Despite the recent argument,” Constance said.

  “It might be you could chalk that up to a, well, lovers’ quarrel.” Joan lowered her voice. “Some folks around here had some queer ideas about the two of them. Now that he’s dead, she’s just stricken.”

  “Meals have to be left just outside her door,” Helen added. “She won’t let anybody in. And nobody else has the key to her back stairs.”

  Before Constance could ask about this, Joan added, voice still low: “Nobody wants to go in, either. It could be…dangerous.”

  Assuming this to be a joke, Constance tittered politely. She let the titter die into a slight cough behind her napkin as she saw neither of the women were smiling.

  The conversation abruptly ceased at the appearance of Drinkman in the doorway. The waitresses scrambled to their feet, gathering up the soiled napkins and clearing the crockery from her table. Constance watched as they bustled out a back door and into the kitchen. Then her gaze turned back to Chatham Square, and her violet eyes—enigmatic at the best of times—closed partway, like a cat’s, blinking at long intervals as she sat perfectly still in the late-morning sunlight.

  17

  AND THIS,” SAID THE proprietor in a sonorous voice, “is where she was hanged.” His name was Grooms, and he pointed a trembling finger at a dark wooden beam in the attic hallway. “The coachman tightened the noose around the poor maid’s neck, threw it over the beam, and pulled her up while she struggled and twisted.” He paused, his cadaverous face taking on a ghastly expression. “You can still see the rope burns in the wood.”

  Wendy Gannon, watching her two camera operators shooting the man’s little act through the two screens on her console, had to admit Grooms was an ideal subject for the documentary. He had the perfect look as a guide to the supernatural, and no doubt he took pains with his appearance: the threadbare suit one size too large for his gaunt frame, his six-foot-six-inch height, the stringy gray hair and sunken eyes. She suspected a judicious touch of makeup here and there added to the Lurch effect. And he knew enough about creating atmosphere to protest while the gaffer set up camera lights in the building’s dim interior. Gannon could see why the haunted Montgomerie House was one of Savannah’s biggest tourist attractions.

  As the guide pointed his spidery finger at the beam, Gannon murmured for the second camera to zoom in on where she could indeed see abrasions in the wood.

  She glanced over at Moller, listening with his head tilted, the expression on his face unreadable, as the guide told the story of the murder: two hundred years ago, the coachman of the house became engaged to one of the servants. All was well until the coachman, who was a nasty sort, fancied that she was cheating on him and, in a fit of jealous rage, forced his way int
o her bedroom in the attic of the house, threw a noose around her neck, dragged her out into the hall, and hanged her from an exposed beam. He then went back to his own quarters, lay down on the bed, and cut his own throat—not just once, but twice.

  “And,” the man concluded, “ever since then, at the stroke of midnight, it happens.”

  He paused, dramatically drawing in his breath as he raised his bushy eyebrows. “Not every night, of course, but often enough. Dozens of witnesses can testify to the horror of hearing the murder occur. All the recountings match. It always starts with a muffled scream, quickly choked off; then the sound of a person being dragged against their will along the passageway; next, the sound of a heavy rope being tossed over the beam; the unmistakable sound of cord tightening and sliding as the rope is violently drawn upwards. Next comes the sound of the rope swinging, accompanied by a strangled choking. Then…” He paused. “Then, after a few minutes, you can hear slow, heavy footsteps going back down the corridor; the opening and closing of a door; the creak of bedsprings—and then, all of a sudden, the wet gargling of a throat being sliced down to the neck bone with a straight razor.”

  Gannon captured this recitation on both cameras perfectly, and Betts called for a cut. He seemed thrilled, rubbing his fat hands together. “Awesome! Awesome! Gerhard, you’re up.”

  Moller nodded sagely. He had brought up to the top floor a large hard-shell roller case, which he now unlocked and opened. Inside, nested within foam cutouts, were the tools of his trade.

  “Get a shot of that,” said Betts.

  “No,” said Moller sharply. “As I already explained, Mr. Betts, I do not allow photographs of my equipment while it is inside the case. You may only photograph the equipment in use.”

  “Right, okay,” said Betts, irritated.

  Gannon kept the cameras still as Moller removed an old-fashioned-looking oscilloscope with a round screen; the camera in its box; a silver wishbone-shaped object that looked like a dowsing rod; a slab of semitransparent stone, allegedly obsidian, smoky and dark. He laid these things out on a sheet of black velvet. He nodded to Betts that it was now permissible to shoot, and Gannon nodded in turn to the camera operators.

  Betts strolled into the frame, face lit from below, his skin pale. “It’s almost midnight: when the ghosts of the coachman and the maid are said to re-enact their grisly ends. Dr. Gerhard Moller is setting up highly sensitive tools and instruments—some dating back to the medieval period, some of his own devising—that can detect what specialists in the field call ‘spiritual turbulences’—that is, ghosts and other paranormal forces. At midnight, our watch will begin. Are we ready, Dr. Moller?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  There was a pause. Finally, Gannon nudged Betts.

  “We have with us,” Betts went on, “Savannah’s well-known historian of the supernatural, Mrs. Daisy Fayette.”

  Now the cameras turned to the heavyset woman who had been standing near Moller. Offscreen, Betts scowled. He had intended, Gannon knew, to confine this unphotogenic person to several voice-overs, but she’d convinced him that the “historian’s” appearance—single, brief appearance—on film would help the documentary’s credibility. And, in a weird way, she was kind of frightful herself, all powdered up like that.

  “The Montgomerie House,” Fayette said as she stepped forward, her voice unexpectedly musical, “is considered by historians of the supernatural to be perhaps the most haunted house in all Savannah. This, scholars believe, is due to the extreme horror and brutality of what happened. These two unfortunate souls are essentially trapped in a continuum of the afterlife: a hellish loop in which they mindlessly re-enact the murder, one as perpetrator, the other as victim. Because time as we know it does not exist in the spiritual realm, unsettled spirits can become trapped in an eddy, or whirlpool, that can go on for centuries—”

  “And become vampires?” Betts asked. “As in the Savannah Vampire?”

  The woman fell silent, thrown off her stride by the interruption. “Well, I don’t know. The Savannah Vampire is an entirely different legend, and—”

  “Okay, that’s enough,” Betts said. He turned to Gannon. “We can edit that down later.”

  Gannon made a mental note to be sure Betts didn’t edit it out completely.

  “On me in five.” The host’s features morphed once again into a smile as the cameras swiveled back in his direction. “And now,” he said as they once again started rolling, without bothering to thank Mrs. Fayette, “Dr. Moller will direct the extraordinary power of his equipment on the very place of the killing, at the very time it occurred, to detect and—with any luck—photograph the spiritual disturbance.”

  Moller’s oscilloscope was now plugged in, a green sine wave lazily tracing across the screen. He picked up the silver dowsing wand in both hands, its high polish glittering in the lights. Slowly, with the two cameras following his every move, he walked in a circle around the area below the abraded beam. Meanwhile, the grandfather clock at the far end of the hall tolled out midnight.

  A hush had fallen. Even Gannon, who was almost positive this was bullshit, felt a shiver creep down her spine. Between takes, the lighting had been progressively lowered and made indirect. It was a technique as old as nitrate film stock, but it was still effective. The setting was equally atmospheric, with ugly old Victorian furniture, cracked mirrors, and worn carpets. Both Grooms and Fayette were standing in the background, looking on. Fayette, obviously displeased at having been cut off so brusquely, had her phone out and appeared to be texting someone.

  The twelve strokes of the clock echoed and faded away. Silence returned. Moller paced back and forth in the hallway like a sentry. After ten minutes he stopped, laid down the dowsing rod, and took up the slab of obsidian. He held it up and peered through it, looking this way and that, for what seemed an eternity. He finally put it back down on the velvet sheet.

  “What is it?” Betts asked. “What have you found? Are you going to take photos?”

  Moller did not respond. Instead, he said, “Take me to the room where the coachman cut his throat.”

  “Right this way,” Grooms said. Moller took up the wand and obsidian while the assistants moved the lights. They all followed the proprietor down the hall, cameras still rolling, to a small bedroom at the far end of the attic. Inside, it was spare and close. Moller soon had his equipment set up, and the process resumed. Again he used the silver wand, walking slowly, hovering with special attention over the bed. And then he looked everywhere with the piece of obsidian. He allowed Gannon to take a brief shot through it, which made everything dark, blurry, and rather ghostlike. Moller’s got his shtick down pat, she thought.

  Another fifteen minutes passed in silence as the cameras rolled. Gannon was eating up a hell of a lot of gigabytes, and it would be a pain to edit, but she couldn’t risk missing anything.

  Finally, Moller stopped. With a long sigh, he turned toward the group.

  Betts moved in. “Dr. Moller, we’re fascinated to hear what you found. Can you share it with us?”

  Moller looked up. “Nothing.”

  “Nothing? What do you mean, nothing?”

  “This house is not haunted,” said Moller. “I detected absolutely no spiritual turbulence. There is nothing here.”

  “How can that be?” cried the proprietor, his voice rising. “We have witnesses, scores of witnesses over the years, who have experienced the haunting!”

  “Perhaps it’s the wrong evening?” Betts asked. “The spirits are, um, quiescent?”

  “It doesn’t matter the evening,” said Moller gravely. “There’s nothing here. Even if the spirits don’t manifest themselves, the disturbance can be measured. My instruments measured no disturbance whatsoever. The spirits—if there ever were any—are long gone. This is merely an empty house—a tourist trap, perhaps, but nothing more.”

  “Cut, cut!” Betts cried, turning on Moller furiously. “What the hell do you mean, Gerhard? This is the most haunted house in
the whole damn town! What am I going to do with all this useless footage?”

  Grooms, red-faced, nodded his agreement. “Maybe the problem isn’t with the house, but with all this hocus-pocus!” He gestured disdainfully at Moller’s equipment. “The ghosts are here—you just didn’t find them!”

  At this, Moller threw him a withering look but said nothing. He moved back into the hallway and began to pack up his case. The now-superfluous historian, Daisy Fayette, tried to say something, but Betts waved her away as he would a housefly. “Get her out of here,” he said to one of the assistants.

  “Now look here, Gerhard,” he said, turning back toward his ghost hunter and trying to modulate his voice. “We’ve gone to a lot of trouble and expense to set this up. This is the perfect haunted house. Couldn’t you, ah, be persuaded to try it again, and make the equipment work?”

  Moller drew himself up and said, in an ice-cold voice, “The equipment did work.”

  “For Chrissakes, Moller, you can make it work better!”

  Moller stared at Betts. “What I do isn’t some circus sideshow. This is real. This is science.” He paused. “You will be glad to have that footage you just shot, Mr. Betts. Because if we do discover something elsewhere—and I expect we will—having found nothing here will make those discoveries all the more credible.”

  At this, Betts fell abruptly silent. Gannon noted that, after a moment, a small smile began to creep around the edges of his lips. “I see your point, Gerhard. My apologies.”

  Moller nodded curtly.

  Betts turned to Gannon. “Action.”

  As Gannon began filming again, Betts turned to the camera, a serious expression on his face. “As you can see, detecting a supernatural presence is a delicate, scientific process. Ghosts can’t be conjured up at will. Dr. Moller found nothing—and, given his reputation, that means nothing is here.”

  At this, the proprietor objected. “Nothing here?” he cried. It’s a well-known fact that this is the most haunted house in Savannah!”

  Betts turned coolly to him. “What will soon be a well-known fact, Mr. Grooms, is that this place is a tourist trap and nothing more—a fake, exposed by Dr. Moller.”