Wildest Dreams

by Norman Partridge

  Not that I couldn’t explain it. If Spider was indeed in San Francisco with Diabolos Whistler’s head, I doubted he’d had an opportunity to talk to the local cops. Then again, I had no real guarantee that Ripley had gone anywhere. The same with the medium—I didn’t have any idea where she might be or who she might be talking to.

  There might be other suspects, of course. People I didn’t know. Circe had mentioned a sister, Lethe. But if I remembered Circe’s story correctly, her sister lived the life of a San Francisco club rat. Sure, that was all I knew about Lethe Whistler. Apart from that, the information was secondhand and from an obviously biased source. But if Circe’s description of her sister was accurate, Lethe wouldn’t be my first choice for the brains behind a murder/frame-up scheme.

  There was no sense chasing my tail. After all, Circe was a high-ranking priestess in a satanic cult. Who knew what kind of maggots were crawling around under the floorboards of her church.

  Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I wasn’t the only one. The first newspaper rack I passed flashed a bold headline: SLAUGHTER AT WHISTLER ESTATE. I glanced through the glass at the first four paragraphs of the article, reading down to the fold.

  Those paragraphs convinced me of one thing—the writer of the article owned a thesaurus. That was the only way to explain the six variants of “bloody” in the lurid come-on. I figured the meat of the piece had to be on the bottom half of the page, so I dropped a couple of quarters into the machine and bought a paper.

  I leaned against a lamppost and read the rest of it. Minus the hyperbole, the story went like this: at present, Circe Whistler was “an unidentified female” and there were “no known suspects.” Police were following “a number of leads” …yadda, yadda, yadda…I’d just blown fifty cents.

  I’d have to look elsewhere if I wanted more information. The sound of simmering rumor drifted from the open door of a crowded diner, but I already had my eye on a guy with a pay phone growing out of his ear.

  He wore earth tones, the kinds of colors that show up best on television. Nothing else about him was particularly photogenic. His skin was fishbelly white, and a cigarette dangled from his lips, and his expression seemed terminally pinched—as if he’d got his nose stuck in a book about ten years ago and had only just managed to extract it.

  In other words, the guy practically reeked “media leech.” A couple more sentences out of his mouth and I figured out that he was a writer, one of those guys who hacks out those true crime paperbacks you find at the grocery store just down the aisle from the Kellogg’s Cornflakes.

  I eavesdropped while the reporter lied outrageously to his editor, saying that it was raining buckets and he couldn’t get a room at the local Holiday Inn. Then he started bitching about the town’s other motel. “For God’s sake, Simon,” he whined, “it’s a roach’s nest called the Cliffside Motor Court. It’s not even in the AAA book. The place actually advertises waterbeds…and you know how bad my back is!”

  He huffed and puffed while Simon gave him some obviously bad news. Then he played his trump card.

  “Simon, you’re my editor, and I like to think that you’re also my friend. But if I don’t have my rest, I can’t possibly do Larry King tonight.”

  I could almost hear good old Simon hyperventilating on the other end of the line. As for the writer, he knew he had the upper hand at last and moved in for the kill. “What happened, Simon, is that I ran into a CNN crew at breakfast. I told their producer that I was doing a book on the Whistler murders for you, and that I’d already created a profile of Whistler’s killer. She called King’s producer, and we’re booked for a remote on tonight’s broadcast.”

  He sighed while the editor wedged in a few words. “Of course I lied about the profile. This is CNN, Simon! Imagine the advance orders we’ll get! Only this time I want a hardcover. No more paperbacks. I want a jacket photo that I don’t have to pay for and cover approval and a book tour. Get my agent on the phone and hammer out a deal before airtime, and—”

  He broke off laughing. “No no no. The profile won’t be a problem at all. These idiots are all the same. This one is a classic publicity hound. He takes too many wild chances. He’s the kind who wants to be caught so he can bask in the media spotlight.

  “Anyway, once they get him, I’ll have a book for you in a month. Maybe less. You’ll pay for it, sure. You’ll pay for my trip to the maniac’s home town, and you’ll pay for my lunch with his third-grade teacher, and you’ll pay for the photos I swipe from his first girlfriend’s photo album…just like you’ll pay for a fucking chiropractor if I have to sleep on a waterbed in this miserable little shitsplat of a town—”

  I’d heard more than enough.

  I invaded the writer’s space and glared at him.

  He glared back.

  I tapped the disconnect and hung him up. As wild chances go, it wasn’t much of one, but it was the best I could do to match my profile on such short notice.

  And it did the trick. The guy looked like he was ready to go postal. “Find your own phone, dickhead!” he said. “This one’s going to be tied up for quite a while.”

  “I don’t think so.” I smiled. “In fact, I think you’d better get moving, and you’d better do it right now.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I just left the Cliffside Motor Court. They only had two rooms left. I got the one without the waterbed.”

  The guy slammed the handset into the cradle, nearly severing a couple of my fingers. He tried to rush past me but I played it slow as molasses, like I couldn’t figure out which way he was going. I stepped in his way and let him eat my shoulder. Then he moved the other way and so did I, stepping on his right foot, and not at all softly.

  I apologized, of course. The writer swore magnificently and hurried off.

  I watched him go. He was limping a little bit. He brushed one hand through his hair and swore some more, oblivious to the fact that he’d lost something he was going to miss.

  His wallet.

  I flipped it open and checked it out.

  His name was Clifford Rakes. Clifford’s wallet contained a Florida Driver’s License, Visa and Mastercard and American Express, membership cards for seven different writers’ organizations, business cards for three chiropractors and two psychiatrists, a few mysterious 900 numbers scrawled on the back of a napkin, and a plastic insert that held several photos—Clifford Rakes’s own private stroke gallery.

  I’d never run across a man with Clifford’s particular kink before—all the photos in his wallet were clipped from the dust jackets of hardcover books.

  They were photos of bestselling women authors, each one backed with a series of carefully clipped blurbs that touted their accomplishments.

  Jacqueline Susann. Danielle Steel. Jackie Collins.

  Even, God help me, Barbara Cartland.

  I closed Clifford’s wallet and slipped it into my pocket.

  I didn’t like having those women there.

  Not at all.

  * * *

  I tried to forget about Clifford Rakes’s harem and concentrate on the matter at hand. Right now, that meant taking a look at the Cliffside, California phonebook.

  There was no listing for a Janice Ravenwood. There was a Ripley, but the first name wasn’t Spider. It was Gilbert.

  Gilbert Ripley lived on Surf Glenn Lane, wherever that was. I played around with it. Circe’s bugman bodyguard sure didn’t look like a Gilbert. But I tore out the page just in case, folded it, and tucked it in my shirt pocket. Then I flipped to the yellow pages and checked out the listing for local bookstores.

  Cliffside only had one.

  The address was on Gull Lane, less than a block away. The place was called Goddess Books. I figured I’d just gotten lucky, twice.

  * * *

  I was right. I only had to walk about twenty feet to find the store, and the display window featured Janice Ravenwood’s books.

  Chimes tinkled. The door opened and disgor
ged a gaggle of twentysomethings dressed in black. Neon hair and piercings and pupils that gleamed like dark little pills. Smiling, they passed me by without a second glance.

  One of the young men laughed. “Man, it’s gonna be some freak show.”

  “Yeah,” a woman with studded lips agreed. “The circus is definitely comin’ to town.”

  “We’re gonna have front row seats,” the man said. “I can’t wait for the fuckin’ funeral.”

  “Caskets for two and devil worshippers. You just don’t get entertainment like that anymore.”

  The sick thing was that they were right. The circus was coming to town. The tribes were gathering. These kids were one harmless faction, but there were others far more dangerous.

  Circe Whistler’s true believers, for instance. I wondered what they would be like, the one’s who had taken Diabolos Whistler’s teachings to heart. One thing was clear—if they knew what I’d done to the man they worshipped as Satan’s chosen one, they wouldn’t pass me by with a smile and a laugh.

  Armed with another reason to make my visit brief, I entered the bookstore. The clerk rewarded my bravery with a smile. In boots, a long skirt and flowing scarves, she looked like the lone survivor of seventies’ hippie chic. Either that, or she’d stolen Stevie Nicks’s clothes.

  “Are you a reporter?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “I’m looking for ghosts.”

  “Oh?” She arched an eyebrow, pleased with the news. Not that I was looking for ghosts, but that I wasn’t a reporter.

  It was simple, really. A reporter would want information. He wouldn’t buy anything. I might.

  “It’s kind of hard for me to talk about,” I explained. “Especially to a stranger. You see, I was born with a caul—”

  “A definite sign of spiritual sensitivity,” she interrupted.

  “And lately I’ve had the strangest feelings, as if there are others around me when I know I’m all alone. Sometimes it’s as if I actually see someone….” I laughed. “I’m sorry. You probably think I’m crazy.”

  “Not at all!”

  “Well, it’s just that telling someone that you see ghosts….”

  “Around here, it’s the people who don’t see them that I worry about. Cliffside is known in the occult community as a place of dark energies.” She glanced through the window at a passing news van. “It seems that those energies may have gotten a little out of hand last night.”

  “It seems.”

  “It’s nothing new, really.” She bustled from behind the counter and directed me to a low bookshelf. “Cliffside was born in violence. That’s our history, the root of the energy pattern that determines our collective destiny.”

  “How old is the town?”

  “Well, we’re dealing with written history, which is sometimes hard to trace. What I can tell you is that the Russians first came to this region in the early 1800s. They built Fort Ross in 1812, and another settlement was established near the present sight of Cliffside in 1815. In 1818, several Russian women accused of practicing witchcraft in the Cliffside settlement were tried and convicted by Russian authorities.”

  “Like the Salem Witch Trials in Massachusetts?”

  “What happened here was similar. Six women were executed at Hangman’s Point, just north of town. To this day the hanging tree still stands. Some people claim that the spiritual resonance from the event still permeates everything that happens in Cliffside. I’m open to that kind of logic. I can’t help thinking that last night—”

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “Well,” she laughed, “it’s only a theory.” She handed me a couple books on the Hangman’s Point witches. “If you like, you can visit the Point. I can give you directions. On nights when the energies are right, people with gifts such as yours have actually seen the shades of the Russian witches.”

  The clerk led me to a table at the front of the store, where several Janice Ravenwood books were on display. “These should help you,” she said. “And they’re all autographed. Janice lives in Cliffside.”

  I thanked the clerk and looked at the books. Janice had started at the bottom of the book world: Living with the Dead and The Ghost Inside You were both self-published under her own imprint. She turned the second book into a bestseller on the talk show circuit. At least that was the story according to the cover copy for her third, Marble Roads: Journeys From the Grave. New York had snatched that one up. It was all about Janice and her spirit guide, a “noble blonde beauty who died at the dawn of the nineteenth century.” The noble beauty in question was one Natasha Orlovsky, who not too surprisingly was one of the Hangman’s Point witches.

  I flipped to the back flap of Marble Roads and studied the hazy photo of Janice Ravenwood. Her shoulder-length blonde hair was fanned over a black evening dress and she was doing her best to look beautiful in a noble, Russian kind of way.

  Which was another way of saying that the photo did exactly what it was supposed to do and then some. The way I figured it, with a jacket photo like that and a couple rungs’ ascendancy on the bestseller lists, Janice was sure to earn herself a spot in Clifford Rakes’s wallet gallery.

  But I was getting ahead of myself, concentrating on the sizzle and forgetting the steak. I took the time to sample the words Janice Ravenwood had written. It was the usual stuff for the usual crowd, pillow books for the unimaginative and the gullible, but it wasn’t all bad. Janice could actually write. She had it all over Shirley MacLaine, and she kept the touchy-feely bits to a minimum. For example, she handled each and every one of those philosophical intangibles that troubled me in a straightforward glossary that closed out Marble Roads.

  I was tempted to clip it and save it for easy reference.

  Maybe keep it in my wallet.

  Or the wallet I’d recently stolen.

  Keep it right there with those photos of bestselling literary lionesses.

  But clipping could wait. I grabbed paperbacks of Living with the Dead and The Ghost Inside You, adding a Marble Roads hardcover to my stack. Then I reached under my untucked shirttail, my hand barely skimming the pommel of my K-bar as I extracted Clifford Rakes’s wallet.

  Good old Clifford.

  “I think these should get me started,” I said, sliding the books toward the cash register.

  The clerk’s expression told me that I’d obviously made the right impression. “In two weeks, Janice will be doing a signing for To the Devil a Daughter,” she gushed. “It’s Circe Whistler’s autobiography. Janice was the ghostwriter.”

  “They couldn’t have timed that one better if they’d tried, huh?”

  “Well, it’s not out just yet,” the clerk explained, managing to look slightly embarrassed. “We’re not scheduled to have copies until next week, but I’d be glad to reserve one for you if you’re interested.”

  “Do you think there’s any chance I could get in touch with Ms. Ravenwood before then? She seems like such an expert. I’d love to talk to her about the things I’ve seen.”

  “Since Marble Roads, Janice has become very popular. And with the Circe Whistler book coming, well…I’m sure you understand that Janice is a very busy person. She doesn’t often do private consultations —”

  “Sure.” I handed over Clifford’s American Express Card. But since I’m here in town…well, I really feel that I have to at least give it a try. I’m having such a hard time with the things I’m seeing, and I really want to understand what’s going on.”

  The clerk’s brows knitted in real concern.

  Mine did too, but in anticipation.

  She opened the cash drawer, slipped a card from one of the trays, and handed it to me.

  There was a phone number, but no address.

  It didn’t matter. This kind of detective work, I could handle.

  I signed for the books and the clerk bagged them for me Then I returned to the pay phone. This time I made a call.

  Janice picked up on the second ring. I mentioned her work on the Circe Whistler autobi
ography. I said that I was with CNN, specifically The Larry King Show.

  I didn’t say much else.

  I didn’t have to.

  Janice took my introduction as an overture. She asked if I’d like to come over for lunch. A few seconds later, I had her address. I should have known it all along.

  “It’s the house at the end of Hangman’s Point Drive,” she said. “My place overlooks the hanging tree. You can’t miss it.”

  2

  At the end of Hangman’s Point Drive, a tree with gnarled branches scratched the iron sky.

  Not one leaf on that tree, and nothing grew beneath its bare branches. I stepped over slabs of bark that lay on the ground like scales shed by a dying dragon. Lover’s graffiti scarred the trunk, and fat black beetles scuttled in a pile of broken branches near a historical marker that looked more like a headstone.

  Anyone else might have thought the hanging tree was dead. Ready for the chainsaw. But I knew that it was alive.

  I could see that clearly.

  The tree bore fruit. A fine crop of ghosts. Six Russian witches dangled from nooses that had rotted long ago, but the ropes didn’t seem rotten to me. To my eyes they were as fine and strong as the day they were knotted, like healthy stems bearing the weight of ripe apples.

  The ropes twisted and creaked against the rising wind. The storm was coming on fast. I leaned against the trunk and stared up at the iron sky through a tangle of crippled branches. The smaller branches swayed against the surging storm, scratching the sky more eagerly now. Before long, I knew they’d slice heaven’s belly and rain would fall like cold droplets of blood.

  I waited for that moment, and so did the witches.

  Spaced evenly on low branches like decorations on a maypole, hands bound behind their backs with festive satin hair ribbons, the ghosts danced on the wind. A plump redhead here, a thin brunette there. A tall girl who couldn’t have been more than sixteen, her naked feet forever kicking just an inch above the ground. An older woman with long black hair that lashed her face like a scourge, and another who had shed one of her shoes and seemed to be searching for it with eternally downcast eyes.