“Thanks.” He turned to Will. “I can probably drop them by tomorrow.”
“I’d appreciate it. Just give them to Kevin or take them directly to Gabe.”
“Will do. Good night, Doc.”
“Night.”
60
Will spent a quiet evening at home, sharing warmed-up pizza with the cats in front of the television, then flipping through magazines with one eye on the TV, trying to distract himself from thoughts of Maggie.
He wanted to call her. He wanted her to call him. Neither happened.
Maggie, in her own home, mirrored Will’s actions and thoughts. She shared leftover oven-fried chicken with her pets, topping it off with a green salad dressed in red wine vinagrette. Zoltan, a fat black-and-white short-hair, licked the dressing out of the empty bowl—why he liked it, she couldn’t fathom—then had a sneezing fit. He always did after licking vinegar and oil dressing, so Maggie foresaw it and managed to snag the plate of chicken and hold it above sneeze-level until the cat got over the fit.
Like Will, she watched a Simpsons rerun while dining, and after, scanned a magazine—Entertainment Weekly, she was done thinking for the day—and half watched the television, multi-tasking to get her mind off Will. Why doesn’t he call?
Kevin and Gabe ate in the kitchen with the pocket door closed, busily telling each other that they knew the ghosts couldn’t hurt them, but who needed to deal with those awful images. They went to bed early, put in a porno tape, and wore each other out. Gabe told Kevin at some point that it was nice that the gruesome twosome in the living room at least improved their sex life.
61
Pete Banning ate dinner at home with his wife—give her a little thrill, he figured—then called Jennifer Labouche and told her to meet him on Felsher Hill for a dose of breast enlargement medicine.
She was waiting for him when he arrived, and she was eager as hell, especially after he locked them in the dish enclosure and he examined her bazongas in the shadows and declared that he was sure they had grown a tiny, tiny bit. Reliving old times, he had her turn around so he could fondle and squeeze them while planting hickeys on her neck. Her boobs were much bigger than young Maggie’s bee-stings were so long ago, but that was all right, because he was imagining Jennifer as a grown-up Maggie—after all, he was no child pervert.
On the beach, Maggie’s had looked adequate, but definitely in need of some growth medicine. In the cove, he’d become incredibly turned on, could barely keep from jumping her on the sand. She wasn’t his type, exactly. It was knowing that she and Baby Brother wanted each other that made him fantasize that Jennifer’s breasts were hers. Possessed by lust, he wanted to do Maggie, squeeze her tits, fuck her mouth and maybe make her take it up the ass, taping the whole thing so he could send it to Will. Then he’d watch Will watch the tape and that would be even better.
She doesn’t know how lucky she is that Jennifer’s standing in for her. It was true. Over the years, especially while in black ops programs, Pete had raped dozens of women, always getting off best by humiliating them. That’s why he choked himself down their throats, pinning their heads against his crotch. Eventually, they all stopped gagging and gave in. Sometimes he’d sodomize them first, just to hear them scream and then watch their faces as he squeezed their noses shut to make them open their mouths and swallow his dick while gasping for air.
“Ouch,” Jennifer moaned. “You’re hurting my boobs. Stop it! Pete!”
“Shut up, bitch. Take off your panties. I want your ass.”
She turned, upset. “What about my medicine, Pete? I want my boobs to grow.”
“Oh, don’t worry, you’ll get your medicine. We’re just gonna take a little detour first.”
Obediently, she slipped off her panties and handed them over. He shoved them in her mouth in case she screamed, because when he said ass, he meant ass, whether she realized it or not. He hoped she didn’t. Forcing her down on all fours on the hard-packed earth, he took her dry. She went rigid with shock then her body began shaking hard, and she whimpered around the panties. It was fantastic. When he couldn’t hold off any longer, he shoved her over and sat on her precious boobs, knocking the wind out of her. Without looking at her face—that would ruin the fantasy—he yanked the panties from her mouth and as she gulped oxygen, he drove in, as far and fast as he could. Her throat constricted around him. He started coming and, through gritted teeth, cried a name. When he was done, he stood, leaving Jennifer on the ground to clean herself up.
A loyal assistant, she didn’t complain, but as she put her underwear back on, she asked, “Who’s Maggie?”
“Just some bitch I fucked when I was a kid. You remind me of her,” he lied.
He waited until she drove off then called in a report to Nedders. Finally, he drove down the hill and, before going home, cruised past Maggie Maewood’s isolated home. Labouche had tamed the monster for the moment, but Maggie was going to stay on his mind. He wondered idly what he should do about it.
62
Will awoke suddenly from a sleep so deep that his body panicked and his mind did the same, tripping back and forth, trying to figure out where he was, when he was.
Then he became aware of the whispers coming from beneath the bed, and knew that he was in his own house, in his own bed, at the blackest time of night, and that Michael was with him. Michael, dead and gone so many years, was back.
“You’re dead,” Will whispered. “You’re dead.”
“Will, I’m here. Will, can you hear me? It’s Michael.”
Dreaming, Will told himself, I’m only dreaming. I can wake myself up.
Michael’s voice continued to whisper, but he couldn’t understand most of the words. He concentrated instead on bringing himself to consciousness by picturing himself taking over the dream and moving his arm to the nightstand and turning on the lamp. As soon as he was in control, he could do anything he wanted, from simply banishing the nightmare to creating a dream he wanted to experience to making himself wake up. That was the theory, anyway. He’d only done it a few times, years ago. It took practice, but he had no time. He had to stop the nightmare before he went mad from the whispers of his dead brother.
This is hypnogogia, he told himself. The voluntary muscles are paralyzed in this stage of sleep. This is when the boogeyman scares children and people see aliens coming to experiment on them. My boogeyman is Michael, and he’s under the bed. I am taking charge by moving my dream arm and clicking on the light. The light will make the whispering stop. Michael will go away. He will rest in peace.
Will continued the litany of the lucid dream, refusing to listen to the constant whispers, paying attention only to his own voice as he visualized his dreaming body obeying his command to turn on the light.
It wasn’t working. He heard Michael whisper, “You’re already awake, Will. You’re awake. I’m here. Listen to me.” The voice softened, returning to murmurs Will couldn’t understand.
Maybe I’m imagining him because of what I remembered. Because I killed him. How could I have forgotten that? How? He still couldn’t make his dream body obey his orders. Whisper, whisper, whisper, whisper, whisper. It was unbearable. Stop it! Be quiet! Go away!
The clinical part of Will’s mind clicked in and he realized he had probably created the whispering ghost to make peace with it. The clinical part was amused at what the human mind could do to itself, but the rest of him took the advice, knowing it would work.
“Michael?” he whispered. “Michael?”
“Will. Will. Will. Listen to me, it’s Michael.”
“I know it’s you,” he murmured. The skeptic in him was having difficulty playing along. I can’t believe you’re doing this, it told him. He thought back, Shut up!
“Michael?”
“Will, I have to show you something.”
“Michael, I know what I did. I know I killed you. It was an accident. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“Will, listen to me.”
“Listen to
me!” Will countered. “I’m sorry for shooting you. I never meant to. If I could trade places with you, I would. I’m so sorry. So sorry. Please forgive me, Michael. Please forgive me!”
Whispers surrounded him, many whispers, all Michael’s, filling the room, urgent and undecipherable.
“Michael!” Will shouted. “I love you. I’m sorry. Please forgive me!”
The bed began to shake, and the air seemed to change, growing thick and heavy in a syrup of urgent whispers.
“Stop it!” Will cried. “Stop it!”
He sat up and grabbed for the lamp, found it. Light bloomed in the room. The whispering ceased, the air thinned. The cats weren’t there, and he could feel tears sliding down his cheeks. The alarm clock claimed it was nearly five A.M.
“I’m awake,” he said, looking around the room. He pinched himself. It hurt, but some people, he knew felt pain in their dreams. Some people even died in their dreams.
The disorientation he felt now was nearly as fierce as that he’d experienced when he first became aware of the dream. Was I awake the whole time? I couldn’t have been.
But he remembered everything from the time he first awoke. He remembered it straight through, as if it had all happened. Did it happen? No. You’re fully aware of how powerful hypnogogic experiences can be. You’ve done research. Don’t fall for it. Go check on your cats. You scared them. Only you.
He climbed from bed, still not completely sure he was awake. After turning on the overhead, he got down on his hands and knees and looked under the bed. Except for a couple of Ping-Pong balls, the bat, and three fur mice, there was nothing under there.
He wondered if a ghost would notice the cat toys, then stood up.
And saw what lay on the bed, on the sheet where he’d slept only moments before.
The world reeled in and out of focus, but he barely noticed because all he could see was Michael’s battered old baseball. He recognized the ancient smudges and stains, the missing stitches. Will reached down and touched it.
It was ice cold.
63
For Will and Maggie, Gabe and Kevin, the rest of the weekdays passed in a frantic haze of patients, most of them new. For Gabe and Kevin, the nights weren’t so bad; though they avoided the living and dining rooms studiously, they were happy together in their bedroom. In an odd way, the second honeymoon they were experiencing more than made up for staying out of half their house. Though they had a TV set in the bedroom, they used it only to run an occasional video; they were enjoying life without sitcoms.
For Will, nights were hell. He had put the baseball back in the car trunk and it had not reappeared a second time, but every night was filled with whispers now. The cats refused to enter the bedroom, and were spending less and less time in the living room, preferring his office or the kitchen or small dining room to all else. Will, in the habit of leaving doors to the other bedrooms closed, tried leaving them open, but while the cats would enter if he was in one, they were uninterested otherwise. The last few evenings, he’d spent mainly in his office after eating at the dining room table—the felines had stared balefully at him from the doorway when he’d eaten at the coffee table.
He still slept in the bedroom, even though he wanted to blow up the air mattress and toss a few blankets on it and sleep in the office with the Orange Boys. He could also sleep in the guest bedroom, which contained a comfortable bed, ready for use.
Refusal to give in to his fears, to admit that the whispers—the ghost—was real, made him return every night to the bedroom. Each night, when he awoke to the whispers of a dead boy, he considered, in the darkest hour, that Michael might be real, but he always ended up discounting the idea in favor of his own guilt over Michael’s death being the cause of the sounds. If so, it was another reason to continue to spend nights in the bedroom. Until he could find forgiveness within himself—in the guise of Michael—the voice would continue to haunt him.
Now, at quarter to eleven on Friday night, he considered facing the voice again. He was exhausted, though, and thought it might be a good idea to attempt to give himself a night off, to try for an entire night’s sleep. He could laze in the morning, having given permission to Kevin to refuse Saturday appointments this week, for the sake of his own health.
Rorschach slept in his lap, Jung was draped on the catpost at eye-level, and Freud was stretched out behind the laptop on the desk, one eye on him. They didn’t want him to leave the room. “Okay, another hour. Then maybe I’ll sleep in here with you guys.”
Freud’s rumbling purr filled the room so suddenly that Will almost believed he understood what he’d said. “Mysterious little creatures, aren’t you?” he murmured as he reached over and turned on the radio. He’d unwind by surfing the Net and listening to Coastal Eddie, who tended to yammer on about government conspiracies and other things that might be highly amusing at this point in time.
“Join us in ten minutes for a special hour-long interview with our own bestselling horror novelist David Masters on the Coastal Eddie show!” an overly excited announcer cried. Rorschach dug his claws into Will’s legs in alarm, and the other two glared at him, furious at the disturbance.
Will quickly turned the sound down to a reasonable level. “Sorry, guys, but one of you must have turned up the volume—and I’m talking to you, Freud—when you stretched.”
The disturbingly smart cat stretched again and let his right front paw rest on the volume knob as if to prove Will’s point. “What’s next, buster? Going to start making prank phone calls?”
Freud purred madly, eyes inscrutable, and as if to prove his point again, the phone began to ring. Will gave the cat another look, thinking about coincidences and picked up.
64
The nights, for Maggie, were not haunted, but merely lonely and filled with questions about Will—all unanswerable—and about the strange behavior of the wildlife and domestic pets. Research yielded little that she didn’t know already; no one knew a hell of a lot, but theories, logical and ridiculous, littered the Internet.
By week’s end, having seen no more upsets in the wildlife, she concentrated on the problems of cats and dogs, leaving the peculiarities of the avians to Charlie. As far as the four-legged pets went, from what she saw, both canines and felines were equally affected. But she could find no unifying factor to work from.
Thursday afternoon, the lab reports on the water samples gathered by Will had come back. The water was untainted, shooting down what had become the favorite theory. Gabe, Will, and Maggie had given up on the water and were trying to find something else that might be ingested by all affected humans and animals, but so far there was nothing.
By Friday, Maggie was back to favoring theories about glitches in the earth’s electromagnetic field, or disruptions from a man-made source. Late in the afternoon, she spoke to experts at the U.S. Geologic Survey and several other organizations, but all they could do was continue to rule out natural anomalies in the Caledonia region. She phoned fellow veterinarians to the south in Candle Bay, Red Cay, San Luis Obispo and to the north in San Simeon and even Santa Cruz. No one else was experiencing anything out of the ordinary. Finally, she tried tackling the closest military bases, asking about sonar disruptions from subs, even though that would only affect sea life. She was hesitant to ask more, probably because of all the conspiracy crap she’d been reading, so she only went as far as asking if equipment in helicopters, theirs or police choppers, might be detected by animals. She found a friendly tech at the base near Avila Beach, a flirtatious young man who told her that perhaps if a chopper were directly overhead and using equipment with certain microwave frequencies, it might upset particularly sensitive animals. He assured her that only a few animals could possibly be bothered, and only while directly in the waves’ field, likening the rarity of affected pets to that of people who could hear dog whistles or detect the sound of an electronic alarm system in a department store. When she asked what type of equipment might affect animals, he pleaded ignorance. Quel su
rprise. She let it drop, not wanting to draw any more attention to herself than she had to.
Now, late Friday night, steeped in nutty conspiracy theories about military experiments, she began to put aside hope of ever knowing what was causing the upsets. That was when she saw the first unifying factor, one so obvious that it could have reached out and bit her nose off. “Hot damn,” she said, and picked up the phone to call Will.
He answered on the first ring, and that was a real surprise. “Hey there, it’s me. Why are you answering your phone?”
“It just seemed like the thing to do,” Will said. His voice was fairly relaxed but she could hear the exhaustion in it. “I’ve been meaning to call you. It’s been days since we did more than trade information on what’s in the local water.”
“I know. It’s been busier and busier at the clinic.”
“Mine, too. You’re up late. Don’t you usually do early office hours on Saturday?”
“Yeah, usually. Charlie’s covering tomorrow by himself. I need a little time off.”
“I’m taking off tomorrow, too. You want to have lunch or dinner or something? Take a walk?”
“I’d love it.” His invitation, one extended almost every weekend and some weeknights, now took on new meaning. She felt a little thrill, like a teenager being asked out on a date. It’s not a date! “Hey, let’s do something special,” she heard herself blurt.
“Like what?”
At least he sounds interested. “Why don’t we leave town? Maybe have lunch at Satyrelli’s in the Candle Bay Hotel?” Then we could get a room.
He paused so long, she was afraid she’d said the last part out loud, but then he spoke. “Okay, but I’m buying. It’ll be our first date.”
The Forgotten Page 21
