But I realize—
I can still stand. I can move! Beth’s presence in me, the movement since then—it seems to have permanently bound up the broken connections in my brain. I no longer need Beth to move.
I swing Wemberly’s head and spine, release it at the guard like an Olympics hammer throw—it trails blood through the air, falls short; the head, breaking from the spine, thunks and rolls, trailing blood. The guard makes a yelping sound and steps back. As he does, I switch the knife to my left hand, use my right to cover the wound, slow the bleeding. This wound will not kill me. It is shallow.
The guard and the orderly are coming cautiously back into the kitchen. The guard’s hand, pointing the gun, is wavering. The gun is shaking.
I start toward them. The orderly tells him, “Shoot him again, you damn fool!”
I roar—and the gun roars back, once more. Then again.
I feel a cold, punching impact in my neck. I fall, fall slowly back through space. The room around me is suddenly a different color. It’s painted red, and the red paint swirls and thickens and carries me somewhere . . . into dreams . . .
The hard part is waking up.
I’m lying on my back. I don’t want to open my eyes. I can feel the warmth of the light bulb over me. I can smell the room. Must not open my eyes.
But I do. I see where I am. I try to get up. I can’t. I try to lift my arm. Can’t.
I can’t feel anything, below my neck. I’m aware of a bandage, taut around my throat. A hose going into my mouth helping me breathe.
I see a doctor, in his white coat—a red-faced man with a mustache—talking to a frightened looking black-haired wisp of a nurse, near the door. He’s saying, “Oh he can’t hurt you.” He glances at me. “He’s paralyzed . . . The bullet destroyed his spine. And this time the restraints are quite tight. As tight as we can make them. So even if he could move . . . ”
I had my chance. I didn’t listen to Beth. Now I’m being punished. But this place was always my punishment.
So I had to come back here. To room 230. Does it do any good to say I’m sorry? I’m sorry. I’m sorry . . .
There are certainly horrors that exist in broad daylight, but the bulk of the supernormal seems to prefer nightfall, if not particularly the witching hour.
The Case of theLighthouse Shambler
Joe R. Lansdale
I guess you could say it’s a kind of organization, but we think of it as a club. It’s not just a men’s club. Women come too. Or at least a couple do. And then, of course, there’s Dana Roberts. She was our guest.
The club is simple. We meet once a month to chat and have drinks, eat a little bit of food. Sometimes we invite a guest. We always make an effort to have someone interesting, and not just someone to fill the slot. We’d rather not have a guest than have someone come in and tell us how to dry lumber or make strawberry jam.
Fact is, we vote on who our speaker is. When Dana Roberts came up, I didn’t actually plan to vote for her. I didn’t want a supernatural investigator there, as I find that kind of stuff silly and unbelievable, and mostly just annoying.
There are all the shows on TV about ghost hunters, and psychic kids, and so on, and they make me want to kick the set in. I guess it’s good business, making shows where it’s all shadow and innuendo. People saying they hear this, or they hear that, they see this, or they see that, and you don’t actually see or hear jack. You’ve just got to take their word for it.
Another thing, when they do have something, it’s a blurry camera image, or a weird sound on their recordings that they say is the ghost telling them to get out of the house, or some such. I don’t become more of a believer when they do that, I become less of one. The sounds just sound like one of the investigators getting cute, and the images look a lot like my bad vacation photos.
But the rest of the members pushed Dana on me, and I was outvoted. So on Thursday night, right after we had a general meeting, talking about a few things that had to do with the club, Dana showed up.
She was a tall woman in her forties, and though she wasn’t what you’d call a model, there was certainly something about her. Her face was shaped nice and sharp by her cheekbones. She had a wide full mouth and eyes that looked right through you. She had shoulder-length blond hair. She looked to be in good shape, and, in fact, looked more like a physical trainer than someone who chased spooks and such.
She went around and shook hands with everyone, and said thanks for inviting her. While she’s doing this, all I could think about was that our club dues were paying for this. We always give a stipend for speakers, and sometimes it’s pretty sizeable if the guest has some fame. I didn’t know how much the treasurer had agreed to pay her, but whatever it was, I thought it was too much.
Dana Roberts is famous for her books, her now and again interviews on television. I will give her this, she didn’t do TV interviews much, and she wasn’t someone that was always popping up in the news or predicting this or that, or saying a body would be found near water or that the murderer has a name that has a J in it.
When it was time for drinks, we went into the big room, which is part of Kevin Dell’s house and library, and where we always retire to. There’s no smoking at our club, and it’s usually right about halfway into our two- to three-hour talk or discussion that we let the smokers go outside and suck some burning tobacco.
That was a bad rule, I thought, as it could break up a good presentation. But it was the way we maintained three of our members, and though I would just as soon see them go, Kevin, who was also our treasurer, liked their dues as much as anyone else’s, because it paid for our food and drinks and occasional guests.
Anyway, we’re in the big room, and we’re about to start, and Dana says something that sort of endears me to her right off.
She said, “Now, if you watch all those ghost shows, and those people who predict the future, or find dead bodies, or missing people, then you’ll be disappointed. I should also say I can’t stand those fakers. What I do is real, and the truth is, I don’t care if you believe me or not. I’m just going to tell you about my most recent case, and you can take it or leave it.
There were some nods around the room, and Kevin said, “Certainly. Of course.”
Then we settled into the chairs and the couch, a few seated themselves on cushions on the floor, and Dana took the guest chair, the most comfortable chair in the room. She leaned back and sipped her drink and looked at the ceiling.
“I’m going to tell this how it went, as best I can. Keep in mind, I don’t think of myself as a ghost hunter per se, nor do I claim to be psychic. I’m a detective. A detective of the supernormal. Most of what I encounter isn’t real. It’s a mouse in the attic, or some kids wanting attention by throwing plates or some such thing when people aren’t looking, scratching themselves and saying the devil did it.
“Let me say this too: I’m not religious. I don’t believe in God. I’m an atheist. But I do believe there are things we don’t understand, and that’s what I look into. I believe that religious symbols are often just symbols of power as far as the supernormal is concerned. It’s not religion, or an exorcism, anything like that that effects the supernormal. It’s the power those things possess when they are used by those who believe in magic or religion, that is what makes them work. The idea of religion has thought and purpose and substance, even if the religion itself is no more real than a three-year-straight win streak by the Red Sox.
“I like to give my cases a name when I write about them, and I gave this one a name too. It’s a little exaggerated, I admit. I’m not entirely immune to the melodramatic. I call it, the Case of the Lighthouse Shambler. Cute, huh?”
With that, she took a sip of her drink and Kevin dimmed the lights. There was a glow from the fire, but it was a small light, and flickered just enough so you could see who was who in the room. Shadows jumped along the side of Dana’s face as she spoke.
Due to the bit of celebrity that I have as an author and in
vestigator, the popularity of my books, I am often offered jobs that deal with the supernatural, or as I prefer, when it’s real, the supernormal. As I said before, the bulk of these turn out to be something silly or a hoax, and because of that I always send out my assistants Nora Sweep and Gary Martin to check it out. I don’t even do that if what’s being suggested to me sounds uninteresting, or old hat, or deeply suspicious, but every now and then I come across something that might be genuine. More often than not, it isn’t.
But if a request hits my desk that sounds like it might be of some curiosity, I send them first to check it out. One of the queries was from a Reggie, whose last name I will not reveal. Reggie had a lighthouse he claimed was infected. Those were his words. In his e-mail to my web site, which is how we obtain most of our queries, he said that the haunting, if it could be called that, had occurred as of late, and that he felt it more resembled the sort of things I dealt with than so-called ghost hunters. He added that he wasn’t one who believed in life after death, or hadn’t before all this, but was certain that whatever was going on was beyond his explanations and that the lighthouse, which he had been converting into a kind of home, had only recently been subject to the events that were causing him to write for my assistance. It was intriguing, and I’ve always been prone to an interest in lighthouses. I find them an odd kind of structure, and by their nature, perched as they are on the edge of the sea, mysterious.
Anyway, I sent Nora and Gary over for a look and then forgot about it, as I was involved in a small case that took me out of the country for a few days and was easy to solve. It turned out to be a nest of birds inside an air vent, and nothing supernormal at all. I collected my fee, which was sizeable, and disappointing to the couple who had hired me. They felt certain the wife’s old uncle was responsible and was trying to speak to her from beyond the grave in a fluttering kind of way because he had died without teeth. The flutter, of course, was the beating of the bird’s wings.
I won’t give you the location of the lighthouse, as that is a private matter between myself and the client, but I will say it was located along the Gulf Coast, and had once been important for ships, but had long since been abandoned. For a time it was a tourist site, but it drew few tourists, and then it was sold to my client, Reggie, who had begun to remodel it to make a home for himself and his soon-to-be wife. However, after a few days working alone in the place, breaking up the ground, and repairing an old stairway, he began to have the sensation that he was being watched, and that the watcher was, in his words, malignant. He didn’t feel as if it were looking over his shoulder, but was instead at the bottom of the winding metal stairs and was looking up, as if it could see through the top floor and spy on him at work.
He had no reason to think this, other than a sensation, but he felt that as the day wound on, as the night came closer, the watcher became more bold, present, if you will. When it was just dark, Reggie heard a creaking on the metal stairs, which was startling to him, as he had locked the door at the bottom of the lighthouse. Next he heard a slow sort of thudding on the stairs. So certain was he that someone was there, he went out on the landing and looked down. He could see nothing, but he could hear a kind of labored, or angry breathing, and he noticed that the metal steps leading up would take turns bending with pressure, as if someone heavy were climbing up, but there was nothing there. It frightened him, so he locked the door at the upper entrance, for he had built a wall and placed a door there for a bedroom and backed away from it, waiting. Then there came a sound at the door like someone breathing heavily. This was followed by a light tapping, a delay, and then a scratching not too unlike a dog wanting in. And then the door began to bulge around the hinges, as if it were being pushed, and he felt for certain it was about to blow, and whatever was on the other side, whatever was pushing and breathing and scratching, would soon enter the room in a rush.
Well, there was a trap hole as well, in the middle of the room. He had built it and attached an old fire pole there for fun. He dropped through the opening and slid down the pole as way of exit, and looked back up. He couldn’t see the landing completely, but he could see it partly, and there was nothing there. Nothing. When he got to the bottom of the pole, he was brave enough to go to the base of the stairs and look up. That was when he heard a kind of screech and an exhaust of wind, and the stairs began to quiver; and something, most assuredly, even though he could not see it, was hastening down after him.
He broke and ran, feeling certain the thing was behind him. Once, he glanced back and saw what he said was an unidentifiable shadowy shape, and then he came to a point where all of a sudden his fear was gone, and he slowed down and turned around and looked. And there was nothing there. It was as if there had been a line of demarcation between fear and sanity, and he had crossed it.
This was what Reggie told me in his e-mail, and as I said, it was intriguing enough that I sent Nora and Gary for a look, and I went about my other business.
When I was back from Europe, I asked my assistants about the lighthouse. They had been enthusiastically waiting for me, and told me quite firmly this was the real deal, and that I would be interested, and Reggie seemed willing to let go of the proper fee to find out the cause, and if at all possible, banish it.
They had gone there during the day and placed talcum powder on the stairs that wound up to the top, to the light, which was still workable, and they had come back the next morning to find someone, or something, had gone up the steps and left prints in the talc; though neither thought the prints were foot or shoe prints. They couldn’t quite explain what they thought they were. They had photographs, and my first thought was that in some of these, they looked a little bit like the hooves of a goat. In other photos, the prints were quite different, and less comparable to anything I could think of.
The following night they replaced the talc and locked the upper door and stayed at the top. What followed for them was an event like what Reggie had experienced, only they had seen the shadow of something through the crack under the door, pacing in front of it like an anxious parent waiting for a child to come home.
“It was a feeling like I have never experienced,” Nora said. “And working for you, I’ve experienced a lot. But I felt, quite surely, that beyond that door was something purely evil. I know that’s silly, and not particularly scientific, but that’s how it was, and I was frightened to the bone.”
Gary agreed. He said the door began to heave, as before when Reggie was there, and the two of them took to the fire pole and slid down. No sooner had they reached bottom, then whatever was at the top of the stairs shifted loudly, and came charging down the steps with a wild sound somewhere between a burst of breath and a screech, the stairs vibrating as it came, the steps seeming in danger of coming loose of their bolts.
“I think that whatever is there is building its reserve,” Gary said. “That a night will come when that thing will burst through that door, and going through the hole in the floor, sliding down that pole Reggie installed, will just not be enough. Whatever is there, wants whoever is inside that lighthouse to be somewhere else. And my feeling is, once it builds its presence to a crescendo, something horrible will happen.”
My assistants often experience incredible things, which is their job, but the way they talked, it was clear to me that they had been thoroughly impressed with the thing in the lighthouse. So we packed our bags, and on Reggie’s dime, we flew out there, rented a car and drove the rest of the way to our destination.
In the daylight, the lighthouse was interesting, but it seemed far less than sinister. Of course, that is often the situation with these kinds of cases. You can’t judge them quite as well in the day. There are certainly horrors that exist in broad daylight, but the bulk of the supernormal seems to prefer nightfall, if not particularly the witching hour.
Reggie met us at the base of the lighthouse, shook hands, exchanged a few pleasantries. He gave me the keys to the place, shook my hand again, as if he thought it might be the last t
ime, wished us luck, and went on his way.
Since my assistants had already convinced themselves there was something in the tower, I didn’t bother with the talc, or other measures of that sort, but instead sent them to town with a lunch order, and went to the top and looked around. The summit of the lighthouse, at least that part that was livable, had been remodeled as a bedroom, and the glass that wound its way about did nothing more now than provide a view completely around the circumference of the lighthouse. It was a lovely view, and I could see why Reggie would want to make this the master bedroom, turning other areas of the tower, eventually, into other living spaces. It would indeed make a unique home.
There was a bathroom slightly to the side, built into a kind of cubicle, so as not to he pressed against the glass and diminish the view. I went there and washed my face and then examined the “fire hole” in the floor, and the pole that went straight to the bottom of the tower. I slid down it, and when I reached the floor, I looked back, noted that I could see through gaps in the stairs the upper landing, which was purposely pocked with holes so as to provide for the drip of water should it ever invade the upper quarters. A problem perhaps, if this was to be turned into a home, but not my concern. I’m a seeker of the supernormal, not an architect.
Climbing back up the stairs, I was suddenly accosted—that’s the word that comes to me—by a feeling of anxiety. This is not new in my business, but as Nora and Gary explained, it was different here: stronger and more absorbing. I felt for a moment as if I might turn and bolt to the bottom and race out the door. Again, not all that unusual, but what was different was how hard I had to work to make myself climb to the top of the stairs. Usually, I can shake off those kinds of feelings with less effort than this took. I also felt an odd sensation as I climbed. That of air that at first seemed cool, and then gave me a feeling akin to dry ice, which is so cold it can burn. My arm was freckled with goose bumps until I had gone up at least six feet from the floor.
Ghosts: Recent Hauntings Page 59
