I felt myself drifting a little, between the alcohol and Gary’s measured words. My body felt heavy, an ache in my bones and gut that throbbed. My eyes stung, and I blinked them rapidly, the neon sign above the bar smearing everything red.
“Seems brave,” I muttered through numb lips, wondering if I’d ever been that. I thought of what I’d done when I saw Bella and Rick, and my heartbeat stuttered.
Gary nodded.
“It was. Especially considering her pimp was a real piece of work. I had been trying to get something to stick to him for months, but none of his girls would talk. Too scared. Pansy wasn’t though. Between sobs, she was singing prettier than a canary. Names of his associates, Johns, everything. She was real upset. Which she had a right to be, because according to her, Ray had hit her so hard he knocked her out and left her bleeding on the floor of her apartment. As soon as she woke up, she went straight to the precinct.”
Lights flashed by outside, red and blue, as if conjured by Gary’s story. I shivered at the thought and shook my head. Just the booze. Cop cars were hardly a novelty in the city.
“This doesn’t sound like any ghost story I’ve ever heard. Aren’t there usually creepy noises and shrouded corpses?” I expected Gary to chuckle or crack a joke. Maybe I hoped for it. He did neither.
Instead, he sipped his beer.
“That’s because those are just stories, Janey. They’re not true.”
He said it so matter-of-factly that I could only stare at him. I shifted my legs on the rungs of the stool. They were starting to tingle with pins-and-needles from sitting on the unstable seat. I had no idea how long I’d been at the bar.
I couldn’t remember much of anything between seeing Rick and Bella twined together and the time Gary sat down beside me. Had it been dark when I ran out of the apartment? I thought perhaps I had wandered a while, lost, before I saw the familiar sign and found my way onto the uncomfortable stool.
I knew I must have looked terrible, because Trudy had left me the bottle of bourbon. Though, I didn’t remember that part either.
Still, the bottle was there, so it must have happened.
I picked at a torn cuticle on my thumb, scraping away the dried blood staining the nail bed.
Gary stared into my eyes as if trying to read something there. I had no idea what.
The other patrons paid us no attention. I wondered what we must look like to them.
A tired old man in a wrinkled suit looming over an obviously drunk girl in a pale sundress dotted with poppies like spatters of blood, whose eyes were swollen from crying. It was like a really bad Hopper painting.
“I took down everything Pansy said.” His voice cracked a bit. He sipped his beer and started again.
“I was real excited, despite her distress. I wanted to finally get that scumbag on something. I told her she needed to get herself to the hospital and have her head checked out. She begged me to bring Ray in as soon as possible. She was afraid to go back to her apartment, scared he’d find out she came in. I told her I would, and headed out to check out the scene.”
I tried to picture a young, unwrinkled Gary, fresh off the beat and filled with an enthusiasm for his job, but I just couldn’t see past the wizened man slumped in front of me. I felt as if he’d always been old.
He’d managed to get one corner of the label on his beer bottle up and was scratching at it with one long, yellowed nail.
“Her apartment was on the seventh floor of a flophouse. It had been a nice hotel once, but the carpets were rotted through, all the crystals from the chandeliers had been broken, and the wallpaper was peeling. I remember, the walls in the lobby were all down to lumpy plaster and rusty water had leaked down them to stain like blood. The whole place smelled like stale rat turds and BO.”
Gary stopped then, turning back toward the window behind us. I didn’t – couldn’t – move, but followed his gaze. More flashing lights went by, dragging me from the story and back into a world where there were no such things as ghosts and best friends did things to fiancés that made them shout to the ceiling of my bedroom.
My vision went momentarily all white and red.
I felt a burst of jagged anger in my chest. I wanted to slap at Gary’s arm and demand he continue, but my hands were too numb to lift. Rheumy golden eyes slid down to my grimacing face.
Gary chewed his thick lower lip for a second. “Those cop cars –”
“Back to the story.”
I didn’t care about the cop cars. Or what I’d left back in my apartment. I cared about Gary’s ghost story.
He sighed, a tire leaking air, but nodded.
“Just as I got to the sixth floor landing, I heard Pansy scream and I started running. Because that scream…” Gary shuddered, pale face going even whiter. “It sounded like a girl looking her worst nightmare in the eye.”
I could almost hear it, in my head. A high-pitched, tearing keen that hurt my ears. Like screeching metal. Or Bella’s teakettle yowl. Nausea rolled through me just at the thought of it and white lights speared into the back of my eyes.
Still better than thinking of Rick and the sound of his voice when he whispered, ‘Christ, PJ, I love you so much,’ in my ear. Or shouted ‘Jane, what are you doing?’
I closed my eyes, refusing to hear him.
“And then what?”
“I made it to the seventh floor in about half a second. I was fast back then. Before the cancer got me.”
I think of running down the stairs from my second floor apartment, ears ringing. The world sways and ripples around me. Gary’s voice tolls like a bell inside my head.
“No one came out to see what the screaming was about, but that was hardly surprising in a place like that. Pansy’s apartment door was closed, so I kicked it in, my gun already in my hand.” He reached over and refilled my glass, nudging it toward me with two fingers. He sipped out of the bottle, smacking his droopy lips, still twirling my quarter on his knuckles.
“First time I drew my piece, come to think of it.”
He scrubbed his mouth on his sleeve. The fabric looked shiny and dark, worn from repetitive use.
From the other end of the bar, I could hear Trudy arguing in a low voice with someone. She sounded upset and I felt the distant urge to comfort her, but my body might as well have been made of petrified wood for all I could control it.
“It took a second,” Gary said, and for the first time I could see that his weary amber eyes had darkened to umber with the shadows of the memory. “It took a second for the smell to hit me. That place smelled so bad as it was.”
Gary was pretty rank himself, reeking of burnt oil and rubber, blood and shit. I swallowed heavily and shifted further away from him, wondering how I’d missed the stench earlier. Maybe some of it was the liquor? I’d never been so drunk in my life. I doubted I could stand up straight if I tried.
Gary’s eyes were steady on mine, now dark as pitch but still glistening like flame.
“Pansy was just where Ray left her. On the floor. He’d caved her temple right in. She’d been dead by the time she hit the floor, and laid there all night and all morning in the heat.”
I frowned, my head already beginning to throb. I’d never been hungover before, but it felt like death.
“It was her ghost that came into the precinct?”
I snorted, because for all that my unease had been building while Gary told me his story, I still found the idea of ghosts ridiculous. Especially when I knew you could be haunted by other things so easily – like the actions of others. Or your own.
Dried blood flaked from my hands down onto the bar, tingeing the spilled bourbon red.
“No other way to explain it,” Gary replied. “How else would I know to go to her apartment? Plus, I had the filled out report, full of names and details of meetings I shouldn’t have.”
I waved him away
, surprised at the sudden lightness of my limbs. Where before I’d felt much too heavy, now it seemed almost as if I could float.
“Yeah, yeah. Did you get Ray? Did he go to prison?”
Gary’s mouth pressed together into a tight line, as if I’d missed the point.
“Eventually. Not for Pansy though. Couldn’t explain how I got the information, you understand. But we got him in the end. It always comes comes around. And she did what she intended to do, I think. Her final act. They’ve all got one, you know? Their last thing. Something they need to do before they can move on.”
There were more flashing lights outside now, and sirens. A few of the other patrons drifted toward the front window, blocking the view of the darkened street.
One of them murmured about an accident around the corner, someone stepping into the road, said something about bodies. Trudy’s voice wobbled with tears as she replied, but her fist was pressed to her mouth and I couldn’t make out her words. One of them might have been my name. Or not.
Gary still stared at me expectantly. I sat up straight, balancing on the wobbly stool, and narrowed my eyes at him.
“Why did you tell me this story?”
If it had a point, I’d missed it, and now I was feeling surly. There hadn’t been any justice for Pansy. Ray may have gone to prison, but he didn’t really pay for what he did to her.
People deserved justice.
He cocked a crooked thumb toward the front window.
“Don’t you want to see what’s going on out there?”
There was a high-pitched whine in my ears. I shook my aching head to clear it, sending a wave of pain and nausea down to my toes.
“No!”
My denial came out a shout but no one turned to look. Gary sighed, wafting air scented with the coppery tang of blood over my face. I squeezed my eyes shut against the sadness welling from his pores, trying to breathe through the increasing pressure in my chest.
“She’s gone.”
That wasn’t Gary’s voice, so close to my ear. My eyes popped open, shock kicking at my heart. But he was the only one there. Everyone else was still staring out into the night.
Trudy cried in earnest now; one of the other patrons put his arm around her shoulders.
The pressure on my chest slid away and tears pricked my own eyes. Beside me, Gary patted my hand with gentle fingers. The other hand spun the discolored coin on the bar.
“I think you should go look, Janey.”
“You can’t make me.”
I sounded stubborn and childish. But I’d seen enough bad things for one day, and I knew whatever was happening out in the street wasn’t going to make me feel any better.
“No, ma’am. That ain’t my job.” He sighed, the sound heavy as a bellows.
My lower lip pushed out and I sucked it back in, tasting blood and bourbon.
“Is it your job to tell random drunk women strange stories?”
It wasn’t funny but I snickered anyway.
Gary shook his head at me, but he was watching Trudy cry.
“Oh, these days I guess you could say I’m in transportation.”
I felt as if my ribcage had been suddenly pulled open, my heart exposed and raw with fear. Gary’s eyes, burning deep, were steady on my face, and his smile was tender.
I turned back to the bar, away from that smile and thoughts of what my final act would be. I placed my hands on either side of my empty glass, staring down at my neatly trimmed nails. There was a cut on the webbing between my thumb and forefinger, but the blood had already begun to dry. And it wasn’t that bad, anyway.
I felt Gary swing himself back around with another weary sigh, but he didn’t say anything else.
Behind us, Trudy’s choked voice whimpered, “I can’t believe she’d do something like that. She was such a sweet girl.”
I ignored her, and the pain in my belly and chest, and the blood spattered on my dress. I ignored Gary, with his spinning coin and flames for eyes, and carefully poured another few fingers of bourbon into my glass.
The Spider
Hanns Heinz Ewers
When the student of medicine, Richard Bracquemont, decided to move into room #7 of the small Hotel Stevens, Rue Alfred Stevens (Paris 6), three persons had already hanged themselves from the cross-bar of the window in that room on three successive Fridays.
The first was a Swiss traveling salesman. They found his corpse on Saturday evening. The doctor determined that the death must have occurred between five and six o’clock on Friday afternoon. The corpse hung on a strong hook that had been driven into the window’s cross-bar to serve as a hanger for articles of clothing. The window was closed, and the dead man had used the curtain cord as a noose. Since the window was very low, he hung with his knees practically touching the floor-a sign of the great discipline the suicide must have exercised in carrying out his design. Later, it was learned that he was a married man, a father. He had been a man of a continually happy disposition; a man who had achieved a secure place in life. There was not one written word to be found that would have shed light on his suicide…not even a will.
Furthermore, none of his acquaintances could recall hearing anything at all from him that would have permitted anyone to predict his end.
The second case was not much different. The artist, Karl Krause, a high wire cyclist in the nearby Medrano Circus, moved into room #7 two days later. When he did not show up at Friday’s performance, the director sent an employee to the hotel. There, he found Krause in the unlocked room hanging from the window cross-bar in circumstances exactly like those of the previous suicide. This death was as perplexing as the first. Krause was popular. He earned a very high salary, and had appeared to enjoy life at its fullest. Once again, there was no suicide note; no sinister hints. Krause’s sole survivor was his mother to whom the son had regularly sent 300 marks on the first of the month.
For Madame Dubonnet, the owner of the small, cheap guesthouse whose clientele was composed almost completely of employees in a nearby Montmartre vaudeville theater, this second curious death in the same room had very unpleasant consequences. Already several of her guests had moved out, and other regular clients had not come back. She appealed for help to her personal friend, the inspector of police of the ninth precinct, who assured her that he would do everything in his power to help her. He pushed zealously ahead not only with the investigation into the grounds for the suicides of the two guests, but he also placed an officer in the mysterious room.
This man, Charles-Maria Chaumié, actually volunteered for the task. Chaumié was an old ‘Marsouin’, a marine sergeant with eleven years of service, who had lain so many nights at posts in Tonkin and Annam, and had greeted so many stealthily creeping river pirates with a shot from his rifle that he seemed ideally suited to encounter the ‘ghost’ that everyone on Rue Alfred Stevens was talking about.
From then on, each morning and each evening, Chaumié paid a brief visit to the police station to make his report, which, for the first few days, consisted only of his statement that he had not noticed anything unusual. On Wednesday evening, however, he hinted that he had found a clue.
Pressed to say more, he asked to be allowed more time before making any comment, since he was not sure that what he had discovered had any relationship to the two deaths, and he was afraid he might say something that would make him look foolish.
On Thursday, his behavior seemed a bit uncertain, but his mood was noticeably more serious. Still, he had nothing to report. On Friday morning, he came in very excited and spoke, half humorously, half seriously, of the strangely attractive power that his window had. He would not elaborate this notion and said that, in any case, it had nothing to do with the suicides; and that it would be ridiculous of him to say any more. When, on that same Friday, he failed to make his regular evening report, someone went to his room and found him hanging from t
he cross-bar of the window.
All the circumstances, down to the minutest detail, were the same here as in the previous cases. Chaumié’s legs dragged along the ground. The curtain cord had been used for a noose. The window was closed, the door to the room had not been locked and death had occurred at six o’clock. The dead man’s mouth was wide open, and his tongue protruded from it.
Chaumié’s death, the third in as many weeks in room #7, had the following consequences: all the guests, with the exception of a German high-school teacher in room #16, moved out. The teacher took advantage of the occasion to have his rent reduced by a third. The next day, Mary Garden, the famous Opéra Comique singer, drove up to the Hotel Stevens and paid two hundred francs for the red curtain cord, saying it would bring her luck. The story, small consolation for Madame Dubonnet, got into the papers.
If these events had occurred in summer, in July or August, Madame Dubonnet would have secured three times that price for her cord, but as it was in the middle of a troubled year, with elections, disorders in the Balkans, bank crashes in New York, the visit of the King and Queen of England, the result was that the affaire Rue Alfred Stevens was talked of less than it deserved to be. As for the newspaper accounts, they were brief, being essentially the police reports word for word.
These reports were all that Richard Bracquemont, the medical student, knew of the matter.
There was one detail about which he knew nothing because neither the police inspector nor any of the eyewitnesses had mentioned it to the press. It was only later, after what happened to the medical student, that anyone remembered that when the police removed Sergeant Charles-Maria Chaumié’s body from the window cross-bar a large black spider crawled from the dead man’s open mouth. A hotel porter flicked it away, exclaiming, “Ugh, another of those damned creatures.”
When in later investigations which concerned themselves mostly with Bracquemont the servant was interrogated, he said that he had seen a similar spider crawling on the Swiss traveling salesman’s shoulder when his body was removed from the window cross-bar. But Richard Bracquemont knew nothing of all this.
Supernatural Horror Short Stories Page 21
