As though the pressure of her hand had released a trigger, there was another spasm of mind-annihilating pain. This time when she recovered, Berryman was with her, anxiously trying to soothe away her pain and his dread with talk.
“I heard you, but I couldn’t come here. There was no way out of that house, and no way in here, not till your brother could persuade Alice Hoffman to let him have the key. It seems your mother always left one with her in case she went out and forgot her own. Can you understand any of this? Are you conscious?”
She nodded and smiled, or tried to.
“He’s here now, looking through your mother’s closet for that orange pants suit. That’s how I was able to get in, sneaking behind. When I found you, you were all twisted around incredibly. And the baby was—” Berryman’s hand knotted in his blood-moist beard. “—I can’t describe it. As though it were trying to push its way out by main force. Your stomach would… distort—”
“Don’t talk, please don’t talk. Just help me get it out. It’s going to start again.”
“But how can I—”
“I don’t kno-ow” The last vowel twisted away from speech into a tortured moan, and her back arched as though making a bridge for the expected pain to travel along. But it was a false alarm. The worst was still in abeyance.
“A knife,” she insisted. “Get a knife.”
“Oh, Jesus, Giselle, no, I couldn’t do… a cesarean?” He shook his head emphatically. Then with an inappropriateness so gross as to border on aplomb, he whinnied with laughter. Instantly he rolled his good eye in self-reproach—then whinnied again.
He bit down on his lip to stop the laughter. “I was remembering,” he explained in a contrite murmur, “the scene from Gone With the Wind. You know, when Melanie’s about to give birth, and Butterfly McQueen has her great line?” He switched into falsetto. “ ‘Miss Scahlet, Ah doan know nuthin’ ‘bout birthin’.’ Which is to say that all my talk before about having helped William Carlos Williams deliver babies was just bullshit. Once, just once, I saw a movie about natural childbirth, and that’s it.”
“Please. Don’t argue. Take my ring and go down to the kitchen and get a knife from the drawer. Just under the counter to the right of the sink.” She took the ring from her finger and he accepted it.
For too long he could only stare at the ring. He felt as though he’d been married. He knew this was an inappropriate response. He felt that all his responses, all through his life, had been inappropriate. At the same time, and at a completely different level of awareness, he was also shit-scared.
“Now,” she pleaded, literally on her knees. “Before it starts again.”
“Right. Right, I’m going. Now.”
He backed out of the room into the small landing and past the door of Joy-Ann’s bedroom, where Bing was still rummaging in the closet. As he went down the stairs, he considered walking out of the house and away. With the ring in his possession he might spend the rest of eternity drunk. Earlier that day he’d schemed how to trick the ring away from Giselle for just that purpose. Now it was too late. The spirit of do-gooding had laid hold of him, a spirit he despised and distrusted, since in the past that spirit had led him from one moral pratfall to another.
The knives were in the drawer where Giselle had said they would be. He took the largest and most lethal-looking, a carving knife, then thought better of it and took a paring knife instead. The object was to make an incision, not to saw her in half.
Returning up the stairs, he reasoned that the flesh of ghosts must, logically, be unlike the flesh of the living. His own unstanchable wounds were proof of that. On the other hand, his endless bleeding was also proof that though ghosts might not sustain mortal injuries, they could (like the damned in Dante’s hell) suffer harm; they did know pain.
Re-entering Giselle’s bedroom, he found the light had been switched on and Bing was at the door of the closet, sorting through the tightly packed hangers. Giselle, invisible to her brother, lay on the floor, her stricken features chiseled into a tragic mask by the glare of the overhead bulb.
He knelt beside her, closed his eyes in quick betokening of prayer, and placed the point of the blade against the upper curve of her distended abdomen. A little pressure raised a pinpoint gout of blood, but the tissue beneath the outer epidermis still resisted the edge of the blade.
He pressed harder; the tissue tore; blood flowed from the fissure. Then, as she screamed, a small red hand appeared at the lip of the wound, clenching and tearing to make a wider opening. Berryman stared at the hand, at the two hands, unable to act.
With the motions of a person squirming into a tight sweater, the fetus pushed and elbowed its way from the womb’s darkness. Its bulbous, misshapen head emerged from the ruptured flesh. It blinked into the light, and then with the reflexive action even infant fingers can perform it grasped the knife from Berryman’s slack fingers and plunged it hungrily into his heart, into his throat, into his one as-yet-unblinded eye, and as the knife plunged and hacked, its little lungs sucked in their first breath of air and released it in a scream of shrill, clarion triumph.
CHAPTER 39
Now her, it thought, and twisted about, tangling its stunted legs in the coils of the umbilicus, to stare at Giselle where she lay, dazed but conscious, on the blood-drenched carpet. Their eyes met, but for a moment only, and then she turned her face away.
It felt cheated. It hungered to see horror, hate, aversion; something, in any case, on a larger scale than mere weariness and release from pain. It wanted to be the cause of, and feed upon, more, and more excruciating, pain.
It drew the paring knife from where it had been sheathed in the blinded poet’s eye and used it to sever the umbilicus. Then, as, in its indecision, it sat licking blood from the knife blade, the little man who had been looking through the closet spoke. “By God,” he said, “this is it.” He turned around in the door of the closet with a yellow slip of paper in his hand.
The fetus—but it was a fetus no longer; neither could it be called a child, nor yet a demon. Let it be spoken of, rather, as a halfling, with regard to its divided nature, belonging as it did to both the physical world of patrilineal descent and to the immaterial matrilinear world—to both, but equally to neither.
This halfling, then, pulled itself across the carpet toward its newly formed, intenser purpose. Through the consciousness it had shared with its mother when she had stood behind this man at the table in the other house, it knew that this man, and the slip of paper in his hand, posed some threat to Robert Glandier. The halfling recognized Glandier as its father and felt some limited bond of loyalty. It meant to serve its father now by murdering his enemy. It lifted the paring knife in its little hands and plunged it into the part of the man’s ankle just before the Achilles tendon. But instead of drawing blood, the knife dematerialized; it was a ghostly knife, taken from the drawer by the ghostly power of Giselle’s ring; it had power to harm only another ghost.
Oblivious of the harm intended him, Bing Anker crossed the bedroom to stand beneath the overhead light, where he might better study the paper he’d discovered in the jacket pocket of the orange pants suit. At his third step, his foot passed through—and claimed possession of—the space occupied by the ghostly knee of John Berryman, who, at the first instant of this interpenetration, was translated out of the bedroom and into the space he’d worn for himself by his own habitual actions within the narrow sphere he was allowed to inhabit. There, beneath the bridge from which he’d jumped to his death, on the dark surface of the river’s slow-rolling waves, he lay, blinded and mute, with blood streaming from his face, and throat, and heart.
“This is it,” said the little man, holding the yellow slip of paper with the delicate fervor one might accord a winning lottery ticket. (Which in a sense it was—for the thought had crossed his mind that were Glandier to be convicted as his wife’s murderer, he would lose any claim to the Anker house. Indeed, might not Bing, as Giselle’s sole surviving heir, have a claim ag
ainst Glandier’s property? The mere speculation brought with it a rush of avaricious and vindictive pleasure quite as though he’d inhaled a popper.)
The halfling felt a corresponding welling up of rage. A bile of powerless anger bubbled up in its throat to blot from its mouth the lingering aftertaste of blood. It sputtered with fury. But this was no idle fury; it focused the halfling’s purpose, made it alert to the cue that at that very moment the night breeze brought through the window Giselle had left open.
Grasping the flounces of the curtain, it pulled itself up to the windowsill. From there it was a short drop to the roof of the porch, a longer drop from the roof to the wooden steps below. The pain of the fall did not deter it; the halfling was indifferent to pain and injury.
Its legs were too misshapen—the merest unjointed stumps—ever to have allowed it to walk upright, so it crawled across the parched lawn and out upon the lightly trafficked street. Though agile, it was not cautious, and once it came near to being struck by a delivery van. As the van whizzed by, heedless, the halfling lifted its head to shriek a wordless curse.
It crawled across Alice’s lawn to a half window opening to the basement. It hesitated a moment, listening, and Sugar, sensing its presence, gave over the querulous yapping that had first drawn the halfling’s attention and began to howl in earnest.
The halfling dropped to the floor of the basement and found its way quickly in the darkness to Sugar’s nest behind the electric water heater.
Upstairs, Alice turned from her fretful vigil by the front window, went out to the kitchen, and stood at the head of the basement stairs. “Sugar!” she shouted into the darkness. “You stop that right now!”
Wonderfully, she did not have to shout a second time. Usually on these occasions of mutual anxiety, Sugar and Alice would improvise a kind of duet, yapping and scolding in happy unison. But tonight there was not a peep, not a whimper. Alice, with an obscure sense of disappointment, returned to the dining room, where the Scrabble tiles still spelled out the messages of the séance across the dining-room table. She felt the keenest urge to sweep them all back into their box and retire the box to the back of the closet and to relegate all that had happened at the séance to a correspondingly dusty corner of her mind.
There was a rattling at the door to the front porch. Had she locked it after Bing had gone across the street? How thoughtless of her. But when she went to the front window to look out there was no one at the door.
Then she heard the back door into the kitchen opening. “Bing?” she called out in alarm—and felt a blessedness of relief when it was his voice that answered from the kitchen: “Alice, you will not believe this but it was there! A piece of notepaper from the Lady Luck Motor Lodge, with—”
He was cut short by a snarl from Sugar and his own piercing scream. Alice reached the door to the kitchen in time to see him stumble back against the stove. His right hand was at his throat to fend off the scrabbling paws of the Scottish terrier, which, having failed to gain a purchase in his flesh, had fastened its teeth into the collar of his Qiana shirt. With his left hand he reached out to keep from falling. With fatal precision his hand went into the boiling pot of vegetable soup. He fell, screaming, to the linoleum, pulling the pot over as he went down. His head struck the corner of the icebox. Sugar, heedless of his own scalding, continued to attack his unconscious, unprotected body, biting and tearing at his throat and the blistered flesh of his face.
“Sugar!” Alice screamed. “Stop that! Sugar!”
Sugar paid no attention to his mistress; he owed his allegiance elsewhere now—to the halfling that had gained possession of his small animal soul and controlled his actions as a puppeteer controls his puppets’ twitching limbs.
Alice lacked the sense, or the courage, to attack the raging dog while its rage was directed at Bing. Instead she did what she would have done in any other emergency. She went to the telephone and dialed 911.
Before the number had rung twice, Sugar had run, yapping, out of the kitchen in pursuit. He jumped to the seat of the sectional and from there to Alice’s shoulder. His teeth closed around her ear. She screamed and clubbed at the dog with the receiver of the phone. He was knocked to the floor but immediately sprang at her again. His claws ripped through her dress. She kicked at him. He bit at her foot.
She ran into the dining room, looking for something she might use to strike the dog with. Sugar pursued. She thought then—it was even an intelligent thought—that she must put a door between herself and the mad dog. She ran into the kitchen, clutched for the door handle, and slipped, screaming, on the soup that had slicked the linoleum floor. She was dead before her body had tumbled to the bottom of the basement stairs.
Suddenly the house was quiet except for a little voice emitted by the receiver of the telephone. Sugar, ignoring that voice, trotted to the foot of the stairs and sniffed at the blood welling from Alice Hoffman’s fractured skull. Where a small puddle of the blood had formed beside her still neatly permed hair he lapped some up, then gave his body a vigorous shake to try and rid himself of the soup that matted his white hair.
He returned, after another taste of blood, to the dining room and leaped up to the seat of one of the chairs by the table. Awkwardly, for his paws were not really meant for such a task, he disarranged the message spelled out by the Scrabble tiles. Then—his last task before he left the house through the little hinged door cut out for him at the base of the door to the back yard—he pried open Bing’s clenched fingers one by one and took the piece of yellow notepaper printed with the letterhead of the Lady Luck Motor Lodge.
Just wait till Daddy sees this, the halfling thought. He’ll shit.
CHAPTER 40
He woke unable to remember his nightmare, though it must have been a wet dream of sorts. (This he inferred as he unglued the glans of his cock from his flannel pajamas.) Then, as he stood blear-eyed before the bathroom mirror, untangling the umbilical cord of his shaver, a single image of the dream surfaced to remembrance—a glimpse of Bing Anker’s throat as he, Glandier, prepared to sink his teeth into the pink flesh. He put the shaver down on the shelf above the sink and closed his eyes, trying to remember more and fearing what more he might remember.
It was a dream, and all dreams were crazy. Freud had explained that. The thing he must not do was lose the distinction between his dreams and the real world. Ordinarily that would not have been a problem; ordinarily he’d have driven to the office and settled down to work. Work and reality were geometrically congruent concepts. But today was Sunday and the office was closed, and tomorrow would be Joy-Ann’s funeral, which meant that he’d have to kill time for two days till he could get back on the main highway of established routine. So, he must do something. Such as get the bedroom back in shape. Strip off the wallpaper, lay down a coat of primer, spackle where it needed it, and then paint the whole sucker some bright solid color that would blot out the memory of those insane graffiti. Such as?
Blood red: the image came unbidden. It seemed a joke at first, red droplets trickling down the side of a gallon can—who would paint a bedroom such a color?—but the trickles conjoined to form a puddle beside the fractured skull of Alice Hoffman, and he was on his knees, lapping up the blood with his tongue.
The nightmare again, nothing but that, but why did it seem so real? Why did he feel so certain that Alice Hoffman was dead? He could not have crossed the length of Minneapolis and murdered her—and Bing Anker too—in a somnambulistic trance. Then why this itch to phone the old biddy?
Did the why of it matter? It was an easy enough itch to scratch. He found her number in the St. Paul directory and dialed it.
At the third ring a man’s voice answered. “Yes?”
Glandier’s immediate reaction was to hang up, but he thought better of it. “Is this six-nine-oh, three-six-three-one?”
“It is, yes. Are you calling Mrs. Hoffman?”
“Yes, is she there? I thought I’d pick her up on my way to McCarron’s Funeral Home later t
his morning. She was a friend of my mother-in-law, Mrs. Anker.”
“I’m afraid Mrs. Hoffman has had an accident. Could I have your name, please? I’ll see that someone at headquarters gets back to you with more information, as soon as we know more ourselves.”
“Is she… all right?”
There was a pause while the man at the other end of the line considered whether to part with this information. Then he said, “Mrs. Hoffman suffered a fatal injury last night when she fell downstairs. There was also a houseguest, Bing Anker, who was badly injured in what seems to have been a related accident. The details aren’t entirely clear, and Mr. Anker is still unconscious. Would you know him?”
“Not really.” Glandier again wanted to hang up but again thought better of it. He’d already mentioned his mother-in-law: they’d know who’d called. So, after suitable protestations of dismay, he told the policeman what little he knew regarding Bing Anker, then referred him to Flynn, Joy-Ann’s lawyer. He tried to worm out more details about the accident, but none were forthcoming. Glandier was told he’d be contacted later in the day. End of conversation.
If it had not been simply a dream, what was it? Some kind of private news broadcast, apparently, but from whom?
He walked to the picture window and looked out across the featureless expanse of his front lawn, as though the answer might be there. And so it was, although he didn’t at once recognize it as such. A white Scottish terrier sat in the middle of the lawn, looking alertly at the house. When it saw Glandier at the window, it rose, wagging its tail, and trotted over to the front door. There was no sign up or down the street of the dog’s owner.
THE BUSINESSMAN A Tale of Terror Page 15
