A Memory of Demons

by Ambrose, David

  ‘Is there something you can tell me?’ Tom interrupted, trying not to seem rude, but in an effort to head off the digression he felt was likely to continue indefinitely.

  ‘Well, yes, indeed – indeed there is. That’s what I’m saying. You see, none of these people, with very few exceptions, were even working here ten years ago. I myself, of course, am one of those exceptions, obviously, as I told you. Thirty-nine years I’ve been here. So I well remember the incident you’re interested in.’

  ‘You mean you know who recognized the photograph of that girl?’

  ‘Well, of course I do. It was my cousin – Alice Macabee.’

  Ten years or so older than her garrulous cousin, Alice Macabee was now living in sheltered accommodation in a pleasant suburb only a half-hour’s drive from the newspaper office. She walked with the aid of a Zimmer frame, but was mentally alert and had a beguiling sense of humour.

  ‘You’ve got to have tea or coffee,’ she said as she hobbled into her kitchen annexe. ‘It’s the only exercise I get. They bring me all my meals, but I get to make my own tea and coffee.’

  All right,’ Tom laughed. ‘In that case I’ll gladly have a cup of coffee.’

  The switchboard operator, whose name he had discovered was Marion Walsh, had wanted to drive him over herself when she came off duty, but he had insisted that he did not have time to wait. In the end she had agreed to call her cousin, then reluctantly given him directions to find his own way there.

  ‘I recall the child very well,’ said Mrs Macabee, as they settled into armchairs by a long window that looked onto a communal garden. ‘Howard, my late husband, who passed away two years ago, didn’t want to stop for her at first. Howard didn’t approve of hitch-hikers. But I could see she was only a child, and it was far better she ride with us than some of the people who might have picked her up.’

  ‘Did she tell you her age?’ Tom asked.

  ‘She said she was seventeen. Of course I didn’t believe her for an instant, but I was shocked when I read her real age in the newspaper a few days later. She certainly looked a good deal older than thirteen.’

  ‘What was she like? Did she talk about herself, where she came from, where she was going?’

  ‘She said she was going someplace, but I can’t remember. She said her mother had given her money for the bus, but she had decided to keep it and hitch rides. We told her that was not a good idea, with the kind of people there were about. But of course you can’t tell young people anything. Our own two were the same. They’re in their forties now with children of their own, and they’re going through all the worries and anxieties we had with them.’ She gave a light, good-natured laugh. ‘Well, you can’t expect children to grow up just the way you want them to. That wouldn’t be reasonable, would it?’

  ‘You’re sure you can’t remember where she was going?’

  ‘Somewhere further east. Where was it, now? Maybe the name will come to me if I don’t think about it.’

  ‘And nobody ever asked you about all this? The police, nobody?’

  ‘Well, of course, by the time we saw her picture she was no longer missing. At least, that’s what we were given to understand at the time. What you tell me now, of course, is very disturbing. You mean to say the poor child has not been heard of since?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘That makes me feel awful, quite awful. We should have done something more, at least made some effort to be sure she was safe.’

  ‘It isn’t your fault,’ he said. ‘You were very kind to her. No one could have done any more.’

  They sat in silence for some moments. A palpable sadness had descended on Mrs Macabee as she thought back to the child she obviously remembered so well.

  Albany!’

  The name burst from her suddenly, startling Tom. Albany?’ he said. ‘You mean she was headed for Albany?’

  ‘That was it. I knew I’d remember if I gave myself time. She said there was a music festival somewhere near Albany.’

  She was looking at Tom with a bright, half-smile of triumph. But she must have seen something in his face that she didn’t expect: something which, from the sudden change in her expression, perhaps even alarmed her. ‘Why Mr Freeman, is anything the matter? You look quite strange.’

  ‘No, it’s nothing,’ Tom said quickly. ‘A coincidence, that’s all.’

  ‘A coincidence?’

  ‘Just that—’ He broke off. ‘Nothing, really. Nothing at all. Thank you, Mrs Macabee, you’ve been a great help.’

  30

  ‘Tom! For heaven’s sakes! Tom!’

  Clare tried to hold his thrashing arms, but he threw her off with a violence that slammed her hard against the headboard of the bed. She gave a cry more of shock than pain.

  Tom sprang from the bed and across the room, arms still flailing as though smashing invisible obstacles out of his way. His eyes were open, but he saw nothing. He had overturned a small table before he stumbled against a chair and fell to the floor with a crash that shook the house.

  ‘Tom! Stop!’

  If he heard her, he gave no sign of it. Clare ran to help him up, refusing to let go when he tried to push her away. A terrible wail started up from the back of his throat.

  ‘Tom – wake up! Wake up!’

  She shook him as hard as she could, but it was a while before his eyes began to clear and his gaze, still filled with fear, focused on her.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘You were having a nightmare. It’s over.’

  He gave a puzzled frown. He looked around the room, as though he could not believe where he found himself or understand how he got there. A thread of spittle fell from the corner of his mouth, and he began muttering incoherently – for all the world, Clare thought with a chill of recognition, like a tortured, crouching figure in a picture of some nineteenth-century bedlam.

  ‘It was your dream again,’ she said. ‘It’s over. You’re all right.’

  She wrapped him in her arms. He seemed at last to come to himself, and clung to her, breathing hard. Then his eyes widened in response to some new and, she supposed, imaginary horror that he saw over her shoulder. She turned. Julia stood in the door, pale and frightened in her nightdress.

  ‘Darling,’ Clare said, ‘it’s all right. Daddy was having a bad dream, that’s all.’

  The child’s gaze remained fixed on her father. What she saw frightened her even more than the noise and screaming that had awoken her in the middle of the night. This naked man with the haunted eyes staring out of a haggard face was some awful impostor, not the father she knew. After a moment she could stand the sight no more; she turned and ran.

  ‘You’d better go to her,’ Tom said, his voice thick and raw-sounding ‘Tell her I’m sorry . . . I’ll come in a minute . . . when I’ve put some clothes on . . .’

  Clare hesitated to leave him, but she could see he was himself again, though badly shaken. She went quickly to her daughter’s room. The child lay face down on her bed, sobbing, her whole body trembling from the shock that had exploded out of nowhere over them.

  ‘Darling, it’s all right . . . Daddy was just having a bad dream . . . It’s over now . . .’

  The child turned abruptly and clung to her as though for dear life. ‘I’m frightened,’ she said.

  ‘I know. So was I. So was Daddy. You know how scary dreams can be. But it’s all right now.’

  She heard a movement behind her. Turning, she saw Tom standing in the door, framed against the light as he pulled the cord of his bathrobe tight around his waist. He seemed hesitant about entering, as though afraid he was not wanted there.

  ‘Darling, look,’ Clare said to Julia, ‘Daddy’s here. He’s all right now. Everything’s all right.’

  The child looked past her mother’s shoulder, fear still lingering in her eyes.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Tom said lamely in a whisper. ‘I’m so sorry, darling . . . I didn’t mean to frighten you . . .’

  He looked on miserably a
s his daughter clung all the harder to her mother in fear of him. But then, as though suddenly conscious of the pain her attitude was causing him, or perhaps simply thankful that her father was himself again, she impulsively held out her arms to him.

  Tom ran to her, clasping her so tightly that he feared after a moment he might hurt her, so he relaxed his grip. She did not relax hers. The feel of her small arms around him brought a comfort that he had not dared to hope for. He pressed his face into the soft blonde hair on the top of her head, and hid his tears in it.

  Half an hour later, having got Julia settled back to sleep, Tom and Julia sat on kitchen stools in their bathrobes, sipping mild lemon tea.

  ‘It’s always the same, in every detail,’ he was saying, ‘except it’s starting to change.’

  ‘Change how?’

  ‘It’s starting earlier. First of all I was in this overgrown garden, then I was in the house itself – some kind of cellar. Now I’m in another part of the cellar.’

  ‘And you still haven’t seen whatever it is you’re running from?’

  He didn’t answer at once. He hadn’t told Clare about the girl in his dream. The day before he had told her about Mrs Macabee, because that was something factual that he would have felt dishonest and guilty about hiding from her.

  ‘The fact that the girl was headed for Albany doesn’t necessarily mean she got here,’ had been Clare’s first reaction.

  ‘I know,’ Tom had said, ‘but it’s quite a coincidence. Time and place.’

  That conversation had also taken place in the kitchen. Clare was chopping vegetables, preparing dinner. She looked sideways at him, as though trying to assess whether he was attempting to tell her more than he wanted to say. ‘What word would you use?’ she asked.

  He shrugged, trying to show her that he wasn’t making too much of the point. ‘It’s a link, that’s all. I mean it might explain . . . something.’

  Clare turned her attention back to what she was doing. ‘Have you told Oliver Lewis about it?’

  ‘No. I haven’t told anybody – except you.’

  That was where they had left it. But now, alone and awake together in the middle of the night, with no distractions and no excuses, he knew he had to tell her the rest.

  ‘There’s something else,’ he said. He was sitting hunched over his cup on the counter in front of him, not looking at her.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said.

  ‘I know what it is I’m running from. In the dream.’

  It took only moments to tell her about the girl, but the silence when he’d finished threatened to stretch out to infinity. Eventually, he began counting the seconds. Ten went by, and another ten, and still she had not spoken, looked at him, or reacted in any way.

  ‘I need to know what you’re thinking,’ he said.

  Her voice was flat. ‘It’s a dream, Tom. How can a dream mean anything?’

  ‘I don’t know. It just frightens me, that’s all.’

  She turned her gaze in his direction. He saw it had frightened her too. The colour had drained from her face.

  ‘So what are you saying? That you killed that girl? Is that what you think?’

  ‘All I’m saying is the timing’s right, and the place . . .’

  ‘What place?’ There was anger in her voice now. She was going to fight this. ‘Some crazy Gothic house – probably something you saw at a funfair when you were a child? It’s not enough, Tom. You’re obsessed with this Hagan girl because of what’s happening to Julia. Of course you are! We both are! So now you’re dreaming about her. That’s not so hard to understand, is it? It’s natural. It doesn’t make you a murderer!’

  ‘I was out of control back then. You didn’t know me. I could have done anything without remembering.’

  ‘Do you believe you killed that girl?’

  ‘I don’t know!’

  ‘Well, I do. I won’t believe it.’

  She slipped off the stool she had been sitting on and started towards him. He too stood, and held out his arms to her. But instead of slipping into them as she normally would, she raised both fists and hammered them painfully against his chest. ‘How can you say what you just said to me? How can you even think it? You . . . you . . . you fucker . . . you . . . I love you!’

  Only when she had exhausted her rage did she fall towards him, wrapping her arms around him and pressing her face to his. ‘I love you,’ she repeated, in a whisper this time.

  He could feel the wetness of her tears on his cheek. ‘I love you too. And I’m sorry, but I couldn’t not tell you.’

  ‘I know.’ She pulled away, drying her eyes with the back of her hand. ‘So, you’ve told me. Now what do we do?’

  ‘I don’t know’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what to think.’

  ‘Why not talk to somebody? I’m out of my depth with this. So are you.’

  ‘Talk to who?’

  ‘Oliver Lewis? Brendan Hunt?’

  ‘Oliver’s in Europe. And Brendan Hunt’s a child psychiatrist.’

  ‘What’s the difference?’ She gave a dry laugh. ‘Grown-ups are just big kids. Besides, a shrink is a shrink. What’s more, he’s Julia’s shrink, and this concerns her.’

  ‘Maybe you’re right. I’ll call him tomorrow.’

  As they stood holding each other in the centre of the kitchen, the distant chime of a church clock struck three in the still night air.

  ‘Today,’ she said. ‘You can call him today.’

  31

  Murray Schenk was doing what came naturally to a cop, retired or not. He was making routine enquiries. It made a change from fly-fishing, a surprisingly welcome one. Once a cop and so on, he told himself. But it was more than that. These were too many loose ends about the Hagan case, and too many loose screws about the Freeman story. All of which left a heap of stuff for someone to get to the bottom of and, so far as Schenk could see, he himself was the only one ready to take a shot at doing just that.

  There was also the lingering and uncomfortable suspicion that if he or Jack Edwards or someone in a position to do so had made a few more routine checks back then when it really counted, when the Hagan girl had first gone missing, then maybe things might have turned out better. Maybe it was too late to make a difference now, but Schenk did not feel he had any choice but to try.

  He had started by making a thorough check of Oliver Lewis on the Web and in a few reference books. There was no doubt that the man’s ideas on previous lives were by most of his colleagues’ standards out on a limb, but he was too distinguished to be dismissed as a crank. Tom Freeman, he also discovered, was highly thought of by his peers. Award-winning commercials had been followed by award-winning documentaries: a successful career change, but with, Schenk observed, something of a gap in the middle. He had already noticed that Tom Freeman did not drink, which suggested he might once have done so too enthusiastically. That, too, would require checking out.

  Schenk had a journalist friend whose daughter worked for CBS in New York. She knew Tom Freeman only through his work, not personally, but she suggested someone who might be able to help. After a couple more calls, Schenk found himself sitting in a movie editing room with a man who’d been associate producer on a couple of Tom’s projects. Schenk explained his interest in Tom by saying he had been retained by an unnamed media conglomerate who were thinking of offering him some big job. He suspected the man didn’t believe him, but he didn’t seem to care either way, and was happy to talk.

  ‘It’s no secret,’ he said, talking about Tom’s past problems with alcohol and drugs. ‘Like a lot of people who’ve gone through that, he’s perfectly open about it.’

  ‘This problem – was it while he was still working in advertising, or after?’

  ‘Both. It started while and continued after. Until one day he had to make some serious decisions about his life. That was about the time he met Clare.’

  ‘That’s his wife?’

  ‘Yeah – great lady. And a very
important part of his recovery – as he’d be the first to admit.’

  ‘Was that how they met, in recovery?’

  ‘Not in the sense that she was in the programme. She just happened to be visiting the hospital where he was after the accident.’

  ‘Accident?’

  ‘Oh, God, he was really broken up by all accounts. Clare said she found out later they hadn’t expected him to live.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Nobody knows. Least of all him. He must have been hit by a truck or something while he was stoned into orbit. Anyway, that was kind of what brought him to his senses.’

  ‘So this must have been, what? About ten years ago?’

  ‘Yeah, just over.’

  ‘Do you know where it happened, this accident?’

  ‘Somewhere outside Albany. I don’t know exactly where. There was some music festival.’

  It all added up, Schenk was forced to admit, to absolutely nothing. So why did he have this nagging feeling that there was more to it, more to find out?

  Then he got a call from Jack Edwards.

  ‘Murray does the name Alice Macabee mean anything to you?’

  ‘No. Should it?’

  ‘I don’t know. I just heard from a daffy-sounding old bird who says she’s her cousin. The old bird works the switchboard of the paper I fixed for Tom Freeman to go talk with in Buffalo. She says her cousin gave Freeman some information about the Hagan kid, and wants to know if he’s found out what happened to her yet. Apparently he left his phone number with this Macabee woman, but she’s lost it. So she asked her cousin to try and track him down.’

  Schenk took Alice Macabee’s details, then called her.

  32

  Brendan Hunt listened without moving, his eyes down for much of the time, but glancing up whenever Tom hesitated or his voice faltered, encouraging him to carry on. Finally, when Tom was finished, Hunt drew a long breath and leant back. He reflected for some moments before he spoke.

  ‘The first thing you have to understand,’ he began, ‘is that we don’t dream our memories. Or, more accurately, we don’t dream them as memories. We convert them into the language of dreams. So if you really had killed a girl in the cellar of some strange-looking house, you wouldn’t be dreaming about killing a girl in the cellar of some strange-looking house. That might be what your dream was about, but it wouldn’t be the dream you were having. In the trade jargon, it’s the difference between manifest content and latent content.’