She nodded.
“All right. Now close your eyes, and I’ll do the same, and wait for the spirits to have their influence. It may take a while.”
While they waited, Sugar, in the kitchen, whined, apprehensive of this strange conjunction of candlelight in the dining room and the dim blue light from the gas ring in the kitchen and the smell of vegetable soup everywhere through the house. Then, his whines unheeded, he could be heard going down the basement steps to his particular haven and hiding place behind the electric water heater.
Alice could feel a pressure at the side of her hand tugging it to the left. Not exactly a pressure nor did it precisely tug, but it wasn’t her own doing and it didn’t seem to be Bing’s, whose hand rested lightly on her wrist, exerting no pressure either to left or to right.
“The spirit is here!” Bing exulted. “That was very prompt. Now, first thing, we must ask his name. Or hers, as the case may be.”
Something urged Alice’s finger to dip to the table and touch one of the tiles.
“This one?” Bing scooped it up. “Keep going.”
Alice—or, rather, Alice’s fingers—continued to move in slow swoops above the table, hesitating, dipping, touching, and moving on, while Bing picked up the tiles she touched and placed them on the plastic rack, and then, as the spirit continued in spate, beside the rack on the dark wood of the table.
“It’s stopped,” Alice announced matter-of-factly. “Whatever it was isn’t doing anything now.”
Bing marveled at the old lady’s showmanship. He considered himself a connoisseur of fakery, and Alice Hoffman had all the right instincts: she was born to be a medium. A pity there was no way he could tell her. What he could do was play the game with the same conviction that she brought to it. After all, it was his game, and it wouldn’t do to be beaten at it by a complete novice.
One by one, with due solemnity, he commenced to turn over the tiles. The first four were hash—D J O N—and the fifth was a blank.
“D, J, O, N,” said Alice with a hint of sarcasm. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Not a lot,” Bing had to admit. “It’s close to ‘djin,’ which is some kind of supernatural creature. And I suppose you’d pronounce it the same as John. Maybe when all the letters are turned over.”
With somewhat less solemnity and proportionally greater astonishment, Bing reversed the remaining six tiles:
B U R Y M E
“Jesus,” he whispered. “What are the odds against that happening?”
“I think we should quit now,” Alice said in a tone that exactly captured Sugar’s abjectest whine.
“Quit? This is fascinating. Look, the next step after studying the message in the original order of the letters is you rearrange the letters the way you would if you were looking for the best possible score in a game. This is what makes this technique so much more three-dimensional than a session with an ordinary Ouija board. For instance, look—if you just switch the fourth letter with the ninth, you get Joy and Burn. Then use the blank as an E: Joy Burned Me. Which is a perfect description for what it might feel like when you get your first look at heaven. Right?”
“But that’s her name,” Alice insisted, having no wish to ferret still deeper meanings out of “Joy Burned Me.” “And she hasn’t been buried yet. Do you really think…?”
“Or consider this,” Bing went on, rearranging the letters. “If the blank were a T, you’d get Don’t Bury Me, and a J left over, as a kind of signature.”
“Why would she say that?” Alice demanded, offended at the most fundamental level of good housekeeping.
“Maybe she’d rather be cremated?” he suggested. “Don’t ask me. Ask her.”
He held his hand out over the Scrabble tiles like a dancer offering invitation to the dance.
With a shiver of sweet submission Alice yielded to the temptation. Bing’s fingers closed around her wrist. She closed her eyes and whispered, “Joy-Ann, are you really here with us?”
CHAPTER 37
“See what I mean about my dyslexia?” said Berryman. He stood behind Alice Hoffman, leaning forward so that drops of his blood fell, and vanished, into the crisp tinted cylinders of her perm. “It doesn’t really help that I can see the letters. Their shapes keep shifting around. If you hadn’t taken over and started pointing out the letters to get her to touch, it would have been alphabet soup as usual. Oh, and by the way, the name is Berry-man, as in straw-berry. Not Bury-man.”
“Sorry. I didn’t know.”
Berryman shrugged. “So much for immortal fame.” He solaced his hurt feelings with a swallow of whiskey. “Shall we return to work?”
“Do you feel anything yet?” Bing insisted of Alice.
She shook her head.
“Spirits, are you still there?” Bing demanded in a tone of jocular bullying suitable for summoning a waitress who’d been systematically ignoring his table. “If we were mistaken in thinking you might be my mother, then tell us who you are.”
“Listen,” said Berryman. “He’s your brother, so why don’t you take over?”
“Could I? I mean, can I tell him anything I want to?”
“Such as spilling the beans about your husband the murderer? Be my guest. So far as I know, there are no censorship rules, and if it does turn out that I’m violating some heavenly ordinance, so much the better. Maybe they’ll stop sending me out to these damned séances.”
Giselle went around the table to stand behind Alice Hoffman, while Berryman slumped gratefully into one of the slat-back dining-room chairs doing sentry duty on either side of the kitchen door. All the Scrabble tiles, which Giselle had earlier turned letter-side-up when she’d helped Berryman spell his first message, had reverted to their face-down position, just as the bottles at the liquor store had returned to the shelves the moment they’d stopped being thought about. Nimbly Giselle reversed the tiles again until she’d found a G—toward which, with little tugs and nudges, she guided Alice Hoffman’s so wonderfully suggestible fingers. The I, the S, and the E had already been turned up, and both L’s were discovered with little difficulty. Only the final E eluded easy detection. Then she turned it up, and led Alice’s finger to it, and stood back to enjoy the effect of her revelation.
Bing reversed the tiles one by one with mounting dismay. Giselle suspected that he’d begun the séance in a spirit of mischief, meaning only to have a little fun at Alice Hoffman’s expense. As a boy he’d constantly tried to spook his younger and ever-credulous sister with stories of ghosts and werewolves, and he didn’t seem to have changed much in the however many years since she’d last seen him. Now it was her turn to spook him, and though it might be wrong of her, she was enjoying the idea.
“Giselle,” Alice Hoffman said, bending her head sideways to read the letters that Bing had arranged for his own reading convenience. “That’s your sister’s name. So it isn’t your mother who’s with us, it’s your sister.”
“Yes, I can see that.”
Alice was visibly less shaken by the message than Bing, for there was still, at the back of her mind, a comfortable cushion of doubt. It might be that they were in contact with the Other Side, but it might equally well be that Bing Anker was pulling her leg. She didn’t know exactly how he might have gone about it, but she was content to remain ignorant of most of the forces that ordered her life. Whenever, therefore, events insisted upon being witnessed and disillusionment became unavoidable (as, for instance, during Watergate), Alice would feel doubly betrayed—first, for having been fooled, and secondarily for not having been fooled well enough.
“Well, do you think, there’s some other explanation?” she asked, after a search through her own mind yielded no results.
“I couldn’t tell you, off the top of my head, the odds of just those seven letters turning up accidentally in that order, but they must be somewhere in the trillions. So something sure as hell is here. Unless—” His eyes twinkled with the glimmer of a rational explanation. “Unless you’ve got
a marked Scrabble set.”
“What do you mean?”
Bing regarded Alice and realized there was no way she could be diddling him. Her stupidity was altogether too genuine.
“Do you mean you think I could be cheating?”
“No, no, no. No one’s cheating.” His lips twitched with a grimace of a smile, and he squirmed against the seat of the chair as though screwing down his ass for safety. “This is real. So—let’s ask her the obvious question.”
“The obvious question?”
“Giselle?” Bing looked up at the ceiling, where dim shadows of the stucco nubbles jittered in the candlelight. “If you’re there, can you tell us—how were you killed? Who did it?” He looked at Alice. “Put your hand out over the letters.”
Alice complied reluctantly. Bing’s sudden lack of playfulness was making her nervous.
Giselle looked at Berryman questioningly.
“What can you lose?” he answered.
Once more Giselle guided Alice’s fingers among the Scrabble tiles, quickly almost as a hunt-and-peck typist now, since from Giselle’s viewpoint nearly all the tiles were faced letter-side-up. It was strange to see the turned-up tiles popping out of existence at the moment Bing picked up each reversed original and set it in order along the edge of the table.
Some while after Giselle had completed her message, Alice announced, “That seems to be it.”
Bing turned over the letters:
R O B E R T M U R D E R E D W E
He puzzled over the w, then turned it upside-down to make it an M.
“Robert’s her husband’s name.”
“I know,” said Bing.
“But Joy-Ann told me, back when the tragedy took place, that he was fishing out at Rush Lake. And he must have been able to prove it, there must have been witnesses, or the police would have given him more aggravation. So I don’t think it’s possible, what those letters say, and I think we’d better stop.”
“No, please,” said Bing with an urgency that only alarmed Alice more. “Not now. There might be some other explanation. Maybe the unconscious actually keeps track of all the letters even once they’re turned over and mixed around. I mean, that’s the usual explanation for Ouija messages, isn’t it: the unconscious. But maybe not; maybe this is the real thing.”
“That’s what I’m thinking! That’s why we should stop.”
“Well, damn it, let me try.” He held his right hand out over the letters and demanded in a tone of normal conversational anger: “So—is there some way you can prove what you’re saying? Is there evidence?”
Giselle sighed. “Now how would I know that?” she complained to Berryman. “I’m a victim, not a detective.”
The poet furrowed his brow. “You did say something earlier about a note you got at your motel. What became of that? Do you remember?”
“I put it in my pocket.”
“Then surely the police would have found it. Unless your husband got to it first and destroyed it, which is probably the case. What were you wearing when he killed you?”
Giselle laughed at the absurdity of the question, which reminded her of the questions on The Newlywed Game. Then, realizing its actual relevance, she broke off. “I wasn’t wearing anything. As soon as I got to my room I took off what I had on, because I wanted a quick shower before I checked out. And when I went into the bathroom there he was, waiting.”
“So the note might still be in the pocket?”
“Conceivably. It was an orange pants suit that always made me feel like a light bulb inside it, it was so bright. But who knows what may have become of it.”
“Maybe your brother could find out. It’s worth a shot.”
Bing, meanwhile, through all this discussion, had sat bolt upright, his hand extended over the Scrabble tiles as over the embers of a fire. His lips were pressed into a tight humorless smile. His right toe tapped out a slow semaphore of impatience on the braided rug.
Giselle tried to guide his hand, as she’d guided Alice’s, but he seemed as rigid and unresponsive as a statue.
“I don’t think he can feel me,” she said.
“Some can’t,” said Berryman. “It takes a particular empty-headed kind of person usually. They have a different way of relaxing. The idea of trance state is more related to their usual approach to things.”
“So what should I do?”
“Try the old lady again. She’s still sitting there.”
At Giselle’s first touch Alice Hoffman let out a little shriek and then a shudder, but she didn’t resist Giselle’s directions. Her limp hand let itself be lifted above the table. Letter by letter Giselle answered her brother’s question. Bing waited until Alice’s oracular finger no longer moved above the hidden letters, then turned over the three rows of tiles that had accumulated before him:
F I N D T H E N O T E
I N O R A N G E P A N
T S U I T P O C K E T
“Oh,” said Alice Hoffman, as soon as she’d figured out that to be understood the second line had to be run on into the third. “Oh!” she repeated, pushing back her chair without warning, so that Giselle was instantaneously dematerialized out of the dining room. “I know what suit she means. I’ve seen Joy-Ann wearing it. And it’s hanging in her closet just across the street.”
CHAPTER 38
As the back of the wooden chair struck its head, the fetus in Giselle’s distended abdomen writhed in protest and tore with its small fingers at the tissues confining it. For a timeless instant fetus and woman were whirled through the vortex of all possible spaces until, like the unique wooden ball that drops from the revolving wire cage into the bingo caller’s hand, they found themselves in the single space determined by etheric necessity.
It was a corner bedroom of the Anker house on Calumet Avenue, across the street from Alice’s. The very bedroom and, indeed, the very bed Giselle had slept in all through her childhood and adolescence. The same little dresser of chipped pink paint stood in the same corner between the window overlooking Calumet and the window overlooking Carver. The same curtains, their flowers faded to a paler pink, their flounces dusty, covered the windows and filtered the glare of the corner streetlight.
The fetus clawed and kicked, searching for egress. As its consciousness had grown, its will had grown in proportion, and it would no longer tolerate confinement. It had purposes and capabilities that could only be realized in the world outside the womb. Indeed, it was, at this stage, little more essentially than a purpose to accomplish some yet unimagined evil. This half-existent purpose pressed its mouth against the yielding tissues of the womb, trying instinctively to chew its way through. But the placenta, even when its infant gums could obtain purchase, was too elastic. It must have teeth if it would puncture the placenta. Like seedlings, its first teeth began to bud.
Giselle had never experienced the legendary pains of childbirth. She assumed the pains she experienced now were simply the pains all laboring mothers have had to bear through the ages—and she tried to bear them. The ring she wore allowed her to clutch the chenille bedspread when the pains were most intense, and when for a moment they diminished she was able to go to the window and raise it and call across the street to the poet, where she’d left him in Alice Hoffman’s house. “Help!” she screamed into the spring night, as the Calumet bus rolled to a stop at the traffic light and opened its doors for a single passenger to alight. “John! I’m here—across the street, in our old house. Help me, please!”
The bus rumbled on along Calumet. Its passenger crossed the street and walked on past Alice Hoffman’s house in the direction of Grand.
Giselle screamed again—a wordless throat-ripping roar of pain—and fell to her knees, clutching the sill of the opened window. The curtains fluttered about her in the night breeze. Cars drove by on the street, and night walkers passed on the sidewalk, all oblivious of her cries. Only Berryman, in the house across the street, could be of any help, and he, without the magic of her ring, could not so much as ope
n a door himself in order to reach her.
A light came on in Alice Hoffman’s porch, and, blurred by the sounds of distant traffic, she could hear her brother’s voice in alternation with Alice’s.
She called again, “John! John, can you hear me?” But the only answering sound was a far-off squeal of brakes.
Now the porch door opened, and she could see, framed and silhouetted by the bright porch light, her brother, still in conversation with Alice. She could not make out Bing’s words, but she knew their melody was meant to soothe. Alice, in her replies, did not evidence any response to that melody. Her voice had the timbre and rhythm of Sugar’s barking.
Or did she, in fact, hear Sugar himself barking in the basement?
The question—the possibility of questions in whatever form—was rendered wholly meaningless by a new attack of what she assumed to be her contractions: sharp fast raps of pain, as though the beaks of large birds were pecking at her inmost tenderest organs from some point within. Her mouth opened and her body arched convulsively backward, as in the yoga position known as the Cobra. She stared at the juncture of the ceiling and the wallpapered wall as though these dimly amber, streetlit surfaces were a veil about to be parted, revealing a nightmare’s most terrible meaning.
How long the pain continued at this pitch she had no way to know. While it lasted it was without end; when it ended she collapsed upon the floor, all thought wrung from her mind but a horror of what had been, a fear it might return. Then, as a sense of sequence and rationality became possible again, she supposed she had passed through the gates of her ordeal, that the child she had carried—for how little time? an interval of twenty-four hours?—would be found beside her on the bedroom’s worn carpet, newly born. But then she placed her hand on her distended stomach and knew the fetus was inside her still.
THE BUSINESSMAN A Tale of Terror Page 14
