GHOSTS: 2014 edition (THE GHOST STORIES OF NOEL HYND # 1) Page 24

  To her own amazement, it was Annette’s turn to be the skeptic, or at least play the role of the Devil’s advocate.

  “Icy air,” she said, pondering the point. “There’s always the possibility that it wasn’t as cold as you thought. A strong draft could have emanated from a sudden wind outside. You know how leaky the roofs of some of these old houses can be. Well,” she added, “maybe you don’t.”

  He drove and listened to this in brooding, unsettled silence.

  “And as for thinking that something was there pushing you back down,” she suggested, “you are probably a man of strong imagination. So it’s always possible that you…”

  At first he wasn’t sure whether she was serious or not, whether she was trying to tweak him for his previous reluctance to believe.

  Then, “That’s bull,” he said softly and sullenly. “I heard it. I felt it.”

  “But you didn’t actually see anything,” she answered. “If I’d had the key to that door, I would have seen it,” he muttered, anger and tension coming together in his tone. “It was scratching around on the other side. Where is the key?”

  “Right here,” she answered.

  Her keys were already clenched in her hand. With a jingle, she held up a silver chain bearing at least a dozen keys. Keys for Massachusetts. Keys for California. Keys for a mailbox. Keys for her father’s home in Oregon, the one she grew up in and hadn’t lived in for eleven years.

  He looked at the keys, then looked away. He turned the car onto Main Street. They were minutes from Cort Street. He looked at the road ahead and so did she.

  For a moment Annette thought she had spotted the little blond girl in the 1950’s style dress, the one who had appeared and disappeared so quickly the evening she had followed Mrs. Ritter’s ghost back to Mid Island Convalescent.

  She gasped. Then Annette realized with a start that all she was looking at was the light from the setting sun playing illusory tricks through a white picket fence. There was no little girl at all. Or there didn’t seem to be.

  Minutes later, they were in the driveway at Number Seventeen.

  For a moment, they sat.

  “Are we going up?” she asked. “To the attic?”

  Brooks looked toward the uppermost points of the house, the section of slanting roof just above the attic and the one attic window, which was still neatly screened.

  “I am if you are,” he said.

  “If it’s an hallucination,” she said, echoing Dr. Rossling’s thoughts, “I want to stop seeing it. If it’s real, we might as well find out what it wants, and try to get rid of it. I want my house back. Right?” She looked to him for confidence.

  “Let’s do it now,” he said. “Before it’s dark.”

  They entered the house through the rear door. The structure was quiet. Annette turned on a light and held still. She saw nothing and heard nothing.

  She didn’t sense anything, either. She motioned with her head and they walked upstairs together. A minute and a half later, they were standing at the base of the attic stairs, shining a flashlight upward.

  She took the first step. But Timothy placed a hand on her shoulder, stopping her and motioned that he would go first. She nodded.

  She held the light and walked up the steps, one by one. He waited for the icy blast to materialize again. Halfway up the steps it still hadn’t. The attic door and its lock grew larger in front of him.

  He reached behind him and took the key from her. Three steps from the top he stopped. Then he went the final distance, stair by stair.

  He was at the top. Still no resistance.

  “Still with me?” he asked.

  “Still with you.” Gently, she touched his arm with her hand.

  Gratitude. Moral support. He appreciated both.

  He placed the key in the lock. At first the mechanism resisted. Then it gave way stubbornly. A loud click announced that the lock had opened.

  Brooks could feel sweat streaming down his brow. With a wet palm he put his hand against the doorknob. He turned it slowly. The latch opened. He gave the door a push. It went wide open in complete silence.

  Brooks stepped into the attic. Annette was right behind him. The room was stuffy but quiet. It was dim and shadowy, but there was enough light to enable them to see. The sheets still appeared to be over the furnishings where Annette had left them. Brooks swept the room with the flashlight.

  Annette’s hand went to the light switch. She turned on the lights. Bare bulbs hung at various points. At first nothing struck them as being askew. Her gaze ran around the room. Then suddenly it settled and she screamed.

  “What?” he blurted.

  “There!” She raised a hand, finger extended, and pointing toward the sheet that had rested upon the ventriloquist’s doll. The Charlie McCarthy dummy. That was the one sheet in the room that had been disturbed. It was wrinkled and badly disheveled. As she looked closer, the doll’s hand was visible from beneath the sheet, hanging limp like a dead man’s under a shroud.

  Not how she had left it at all. Annette walked cautiously to where the dummy had lain beneath a sheet. Her hand had a quiver to it as she reached to the small wooden body.

  “Annette, careful,” Tim warned. “Want me to do that?”

  But by this time, she was undeterred. At least for the moment. “No,” she said.

  She held the sheet in her hand, then yanked it back. She dropped it with a shriek, raised her hand to her mouth in horror and looked away.

  She recoiled into Timothy’s arms. He held her tightly as he looked also upon the object of her horror.

  He muttered a low, mild oath. But he did not avert his eyes.

  He stared, transfixed. Stupefied. Astonished.

  Someone—or something—had smashed and mutilated the doll. Its clothing had been removed and its limbs had been spread out in all four directions, as if it had been tied to stakes. Then, as if with some blunt instrument, all four limbs had been smashed. They had each been broken in single crucial points, the arms above the bare elbows, the legs above the knees.

  Thump. Thump. Thump. In his memory, Brooks could still hear it.

  But the mutilation of the limbs wasn’t even the worst part.

  Charlie McCarthy’s head was gone. Whatever force had broken the arms had finished the project—or maybe had started it—with a decapitation.

  Annette started to cry. Brooks tried to pull her from the room.

  “Who is doing this?” she cried. “Why won’t it stop?”

  Timothy tried to get her out of the attic again, but she would not leave. Not until she had located the dummy’s head. It was lying clear across the attic, dented badly. It looked to have been pitched across the room and against the attic wall.

  Then it had rolled—Brooks had heard it roll—until it lodged in a comer.

  The clothes? The doll’s black top hat? A small pile was found under the table upon which the dummy rested. Compactly arranged. Neatly folded. Almost in a mocking fashion. Annette took the mangled doll in her arms. She held the head and retrieved the clothes. She found a small canvas duffel bag and put the doll, its many broken parts and its attire, all together in the bag.

  “I know a puppet man in West Hollywood,” she said between sobs. “Brilliant man. Works in films. He can fix anything.”

  “Of course, he can,” Brooks assured her.

  “We’re fighting back, Tim,” she said to him, recovering, her will growing stronger. “This was my mother’s. We’ll ship Charlie out tomorrow to be repaired. Right? Tomorrow!”

  “Tomorrow,” Brooks agreed.

  Shaken, they left the attic. They relocked the door. No force followed them. No icy air. No sense of being pushed or pursued. They walked downstairs. Annette laid the duffel bag nearby on a sofa in the living room. She collapsed onto the sofa and looked at Timothy.

  “Where do you live on this island?” she asked.

  He described his lodgings on the opposite shore.

  “Do you have a guest room?
”

  “I have a sofa,” he said.

  “Can I use it? Tonight? To sleep?”

  For an instant, he didn’t realize she was serious. Then it hit him.

  “Well, yes. Of course. But…”

  “Thanks. I’ll only be a minute.”

  She disappeared upstairs to collect a few things for overnight. Stunned once again, he might have been euphoric. But that voice was back. The one inside him. The one he didn’t like.

  “You can put the dummy’s had back on, you pious sinner!” it croaked.

  “Won’t be so easy with two human heads. Yours and hers! Yours and hers!

  Ah, what a lovely day for some more decapitations!”

  Something feeling like ice crystals flowed through his veins.

  “Go away,” he whispered.

  The voice dissolved in laughter.

  Moments later, Brooks was more than relieved when Annette returned again downstairs and gave him a brave smile. “All right,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  “My pleasure,” he said. He let her leave first and gave a sidelong look behind him as she closed the door and locked it.

  He was relieved to not see anything.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Brooks drove them to his cottage. He parked in his driveway and led Annette to the front door. “It’s humble,” he warned her, “but it’s home.”

  His cottage was cozier in the evening than during the day. Night had a way of hiding many of its shortcomings. He turned on a pair of Cape Cod-style lamps in the living room. The softness of their light gave the room a homey touch.

  She looked around and smiled. “I like it,” she said. “You decorated this by yourself?”

  “Me and the local thrift shop,” he said with a smile.

  “You did well.” She meant it.

  “For a policeman’s salary…” he said with a shrug. “I could do worse. I’ll say this much, there’s probably nothing like it in Beverly Hills. “

  “I wouldn’t know,” she said, “I spend as little time there as possible.”

  He laughed. He carried her overnight bag into the bedroom and dropped it just inside the door. Then he offered her a seat in the living room. She relaxed into a club chair that he had once bought for fifteen dollars.

  “I’m giving you my bedroom for the night,” he said. “It will just take a moment to get it ready for you.”

  She protested, saying that she would sleep on the sofa. He said that he wouldn’t hear of such an arrangement and told her not to argue. She was, after all, a guest.

  “But I invited myself,” she said.

  “And I accepted your invitation,” he reminded her. “So sit tight, okay?”

  She waited as he quickly straightened his bedroom and remade the bed with fresh sheets.

  “Can I get you something to drink?” he asked, returning to the living room. “Try to pick something I have.”

  “White wine?”

  “Good guess. You win. It was that or beer.”

  “Beer was my second choice.”

  He went to his kitchen and retrieved a bottle of California Chardonnay from his refrigerator. It had been there for a year. He smiled to himself, glad to finally get rid of it. He couldn’t even remember who had given it to him.

  He opened it and poured two glasses of wine. He walked back to the living room and handed one to Annette.

  He set the other down on a coffee table in front of a sofa. He leaned over his CD player, turned it on, and reached for a box of disks that lay beside the unit. His hand came up with Joan Sutherland singing arias from an Italian opera. Well, it was that or ABBA or Journey. He went with the luck of the draw and set the disk into place.

  She watched him the entire time, sipping liberally from the Chardonnay. She didn’t speak until Dame Joan began to sing. “What kind of cop are you?” she finally asked when he sat down on the sofa across from her.

  “I’m a town cop.”

  “That’s not what I mean,” she said. “You’re a detective and you seem to spend most of your off hours playing pickup basketball. You live on an island in the Northeast but you’re from the Midwest. You should be solidly blue collar, but you pop Verdi onto your CD player.”

  “That’s Puccini,” he said.

  She looked him in the eye.

  “I know. It’s Tosca. I was testing you.”

  “And I passed?”

  “You’re just becoming more and more unusual as a cop.”

  “I’ll bet that you don’t personally know very many cops,” he said.

  She sipped more wine. “Point,” she said. “I’ve received traffic tickets in seven states, however. Does that count?”

  “Is Massachusetts one of them?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Then it doesn’t count.”

  “I played a policewoman on television once but we didn’t have a technical advisor on the set.”

  “What movie was that?” he asked. “Or what TV show?”

  “Neither. It was a commercial for radial tires. An actor and I would swagger out of a police car and do a twenty-second spiel about driving safety, all predicated on the brand of tires we were pitching. I think it was Goodyear. Or maybe it was Goodrich. Which one of them has the blimp?”

  “Fuji,” he said.

  They both laughed. In a funny way, it sounded glamorous, acting at being a cop rather than being one.

  “I missed that commercial,” he finally said. “And here I thought I’d seen all of your work.”

  “Have you?” She was surprised, almost to the point of embarrassment.

  “All the movies,” he said. “None of the commercials.”

  “You never told me you’d seen my films.”

  “You didn’t ask,” he said. “Does it surprise you?”

  “No, no,” she said, setting down the wineglass. “It’s just that sometimes it’s the first thing people say when I meet them.” She imitated such a greeting: “ ‘Oh, Miss Carlson. I’ve seen all of your films…’ And so on.”

  “Does it get tiresome?”

  “It’s well meaning, but yes. It gets tiresome.”

  “I figured as much. That’s why I didn’t mention it,” he said.

  He looked at her glass, which was almost empty.

  “More wine?” he asked. She accepted.

  He guided the line of conversation farther afield. He moved through a half hour’s worth of topics. Anything but ghosts, spirits, 17 Cort Street or his friend, George Andrew Osaro. “Tell me something else,” he finally asked.

  “What’s that?”

  “Are you hungry?”

  She allowed that she hadn’t eaten since morning.

  “Then we’re in the wrong place,” he said. “Let’s go out, okay?”

  “Only if you let me pay,” she said.

  “We’ll do it Dutch,” he suggested. “How’s that?”

  “Unacceptable,” she said. “You’re putting me up overnight, so I’m buying dinner. Deal or no deal?”

  “Deal,” he said.

  They drove back into town and went for a late supper at one of the less formal restaurants near the ferry terminal on Straight Wharf. The place was crowded and noisy which allowed them just the reassuring atmosphere they needed to discuss the events of the day, from Dr. Rossling to the decapitated dummy in her attic to the collapse of the china cabinet in her home several days earlier.

  They didn’t leave until after eleven, at which time they drove past 17 Cort Street. The house was ominously dark and quiet. They didn’t speak as they passed it. Annette wished that she had left some lights on, but shuddered at the notion of going back in.

  They arrived at Brooks’ cottage at about eleven thirty. Annette excused herself a few minutes later. She disappeared into the bedroom and closed the door.

  Tim Brooks settled in to spend the night in his living room. He drew the two large shades that covered the pair of windows that overlooked his front yard. He threw an extra pillow on the sofa. He kep
t his service revolver near him. He placed it under the sofa. It was out of view but within his reach.

  Then he eased himself onto the sofa and lay back. He read a novel for almost half an hour, then felt drowsy. He turned the room lights off just past midnight.

  Drifting toward sleep, his body gave one of those involuntary jumps that one suffers sometimes on the threshold of a dream. Brooks thought he felt something touch his shoulder in the darkness. At first he sensed it was Annette, but then—as his eyes opened a crack—he realized that her door was still shut.

  So he whirled.

  There was nothing there. He remained wakeful for several minutes, then settled back to sleep. He feared that he would have a second manifestation of his black nightmare. The dream with the black ghost. But nothing bothered him when he tried to sleep a second time.

  Something, however lifted him from a peaceful rest toward three A.M. From where he slept, all light in the living room had been sealed off from the outside. But the door leading down the hall to his kitchen was now open, even though he was certain he had closed it.

  Light from outside, moonlight and one street lamp, flowed through a window over his dining alcove in the kitchen. That light flowed down the hallway toward the living room. And as Brooks looked at it with sleepy eyes, he did not like the way it appeared.

  The light cast a long shadow that had a bizarre configuration. It was as if a man were standing in the doorway of Brooks’ kitchen. The arms, legs and torso were defined quite clearly. But the rest was bizarre and in defiance of nature. The figure was headless.

  Brooks stared at this and gradually came awake.

  It is impossible that anyone has come in here, he thought to himself.