Unnerved, I turned, and Stormy turned, and behind us stood the spirit, which manifested with his neck intact.
“You see something?” she asked.
“Dead guy.”
“What’s he doing?”
His blue eyes were gas-flame bright, his face tortured by conflicting emotions. As if demanding justice, he pointed at me. Baring his clenched teeth, he thrust the same finger toward the ceiling, and like Clark Kent in an emergency that allowed no time for changing into cape and tights, he shot out of the kitchen and through the plaster overhead, causing no damage in his sudden exit.
“What just happened?” Stormy whispered.
“Well, basically, pointing the way, he flew through the ceiling. The killer must be upstairs.”
“Let’s get him.”
“I can handle this myself.”
“Boyfriend, you’re not going up there alone.”
I raised the rolling pin. “This is all I need.”
Raising the steel baton, she said, “And this is all I need.”
“Sometimes you make me nuts.”
She smiled. “You wouldn’t love me if I didn’t.”
We went upstairs.
Four
The stairs creaked. They always creaked when creaking could lead to your death, and they never creaked when creaking didn’t matter. The universe is anthropic, meaning that its design makes possible and sustains intelligent life, especially human beings. Nevertheless, I perceive some power, some presence, some adversary behind the scenes that by countless devices subtle or blunt seeks to destroy us. On the second floor, the master bedroom, a second bedroom, a bathroom, and a hall closet were deserted, but all the door hinges squeaked or rasped, or did both.
Two women were in the third bedroom, at the back of the house. They looked up, frightened, when I pushed open the door.
The youngest of the two was an attractive blonde in her late twenties. She was sitting on the edge of a bed, fully clothed but chained to a steel ring that had been welded to the bed frame.
The other woman fumbled with a collection of keys, trying to free the blonde from the manacle that connected her to the chain. She was gaunt, disheveled, her thin arms mottled with bruises, her right eye swollen shut. When she turned to me, terror and timidity were written large across her paper-pale face, but the tight corners of her mouth suggested determination, and in her green eyes I thought I read a wild scrawl of triumph.
In spite of the rolling pin that I carried and Stormy’s martial-arts baton, the older woman’s initial fright gave way to a kind of frantic but inconstant gladness. One moment, she seemed relieved and rejoicing, as if she had just disarmed a bomb, but an instant later, her face clouded and a frown briefly replaced her grin, as though she heard the bomb clock ticking again.
She scowled. “Who’re you? What’re you doin’ in my house?”
“There’s a dead man—” I began.
“Yeah, Kurt. He moved in on me, moved in smooth as butter. I didn’t see the snake he was till too late. Bastard Kurt, stone dead now, sick bastard, stone dead.” She grinned as though I had told her that she’d won the lottery. “I chopped on him real good, damn if I didn’t. Me, useless old Roberta, I finally done it.” She appeared to be amazed that she had been capable of killing Kurt. “I chopped him like he weren’t but a rack of ribs. Wish I’d chopped him a couple hundred times, chopped him up and down, ’fore I killed him. Wish I’d had the nerve years ago.”
Apparently Stormy decided no threat existed here, or maybe she thought I looked ridiculous as I brandished the rolling pin, because she handed me the stainless-steel baton. The emotionally fragile Roberta, struggling with the manacle lock, had begun to cry. Stormy went to her, put a hand on her shoulder as though to console her, and relieved her of the keys.
Voice trembling more with anger than with fear, the blonde said, “I was on my way to work. It wasn’t even dawn yet. He came up behind me. It happened so fast.”
As Stormy examined the keys, Roberta explained herself through a veil of tears: “He brung this one other girl last year, just like he brung Kristen this mornin’. He beat me near to death ’cause I said just please let Hannah go. Hannah was her name. He kept her in this here same room. Treated her like she weren’t nothin’ but a thing. He broke that girl, just like he broke me, broke her bad.”
Stormy was having trouble finding the key to the manacle.
Trembling, alert for some sudden attack, Kristen said, “Where are the cops? Why didn’t you call the cops?”
“No cell-phone service out here,” I said.
“Use the house line.”
“There ain’t none,” Roberta declared, wiping away tears, still an unstable brew of emotions, phasing now from sorrow to anger in an instant. “The mean sonofabitch never let me have no phone. When he’d go out, he locked me down in the cellar, like you wouldn’t even lock up some dog.”
Stormy said, “Kurt had more keys than a prison warden, but none of them work.” She looked at me. “Why would he lead us here?”
“Vengeance, I guess. Even the wicked feel justified in wanting vengeance.”
I thought of the kitchen, the collection of “pigurines” and the needlework samplers that suggested a time before Kurt, when Roberta had evidently led a simple but happy life in this house. I recalled the moment when the framed samplers rattled against the walls and the pigs clinked against one another, as if in a mild earthquake—just as Kurt’s angry spirit had manifested.
Evidently my expression revealed my alarm, because Stormy said, “What’s wrong?”
Before I could reply, the spirit of Kurt rose into the room, as though for the past few minutes he’d been wandering and lost between the kitchen ceiling and the bedroom floor. Once more, he manifested with his mortal wounds, soaked in blood, a demonic figure around which the air was smoky, murky, as if he pulled with him some of the darkness from the realm of the dead where he belonged. Glaring at Roberta and then at me, he pointed repeatedly to the meat cleaver in his neck, as if I might have failed to notice it. Thrusting an accusatory finger at the woman who killed him, he looked equally furious and exasperated, having apparently reached the conclusion that I had the IQ of an amoeba.
“You’ve already gotten the justice you deserved,” I told him. “You don’t belong here anymore. Just move on.”
Roberta said, “Who’re you talkin’ to?”
Enraged by my failure to beat the woman to death with either the martial-arts baton or the rolling pin, Kurt pulled the cleaver from his neck and threw it at me. Because it wasn’t a real blade, only the idea of one, it passed harmlessly through me.
“You can’t do any more damage in this world,” I told him.
“Who’s he talkin’ to?” Roberta asked Stormy.
“Nobody,” Stormy said. “He’s just quirky. Are there other keys?”
“Quirky?” Kristen was alarmed by the possibility of an encounter with another homicidal lunatic. “What do you mean, quirky?”
“Peculiar,” Stormy replied. “But in a good way. He’s quirky but adorable.” To Roberta, she said again, “Are there any other keys?”
His head now seated firmly on his neck, face contorted by fury, Kurt raised his hands, and from his palms issued concentric pulses of energy visible to me but to no one else.
I said, “Uh-oh.”
Spirits lingering in this world have only one way to harm the rest of us. If their lives were marbled with many evil acts, if they are spiritually malignant to a sufficient degree, they are able to convert their demonic rage into destructive energy and vent it upon the inanimate.
Kurt was going poltergeist.
“There’s no point in this,” I counseled him. “All you’re doing is delaying the
inevitable and ensuring yourself greater suffering when you finally cross over.”
“He’s weird,” Kristen said, referring to me.
“Quirky,” Stormy insisted.
Not susceptible to my charms, Kristen said, “Roberta! Are there other keys anywhere?”
Roberta felt her pockets, looked surprised, “Maybe these,” she said, producing a ring of ten or twelve keys.
The pulses of energy that Kurt emitted grew brighter, concentric ripples issuing from him faster, faster.
The bedroom door crashed shut before anyone could move toward it. Roberta dropped the new set of keys, hurried across the room, and wrenched the knob back and forth.
I scooped up the keys and tossed them to Stormy.
When the door wouldn’t relent, Roberta returned to us, shivering and shaking her right hand as if the doorknob had been freezing.
“There!” Stormy declared, having found the right key to unlock the manacle.
Freed, Kristen sprang at once off the bed, as though it were saturated with some pestilence infinitely more horrific than the black plague. Although Roberta had saved her life, she shied from the woman, too, as if not convinced that everything was as it seemed to be. Stormy and I excited her suspicion, as well. She ran to the door, but she had no more success with it than had Roberta.
Nightstand drawers opened of their own accord, slammed shut, slid open, shut, and now the dresser drawers, whispering on their slides, banging shut, banging, banging. A mahogany highboy spat out its drawers entirely, spilling their contents as they clattered to the floor.
Roberta’s stew of emotions—sorrow, anger, frantic gladness—had boiled down to a thick reduction of fear. She stood awestruck, turning this way and that, arguing against the clear evidence of her senses—“This ain’t happenin’, no way, no, no”—and raising her already bruised arms to ward off whatever missiles might come her way.
The six-foot length of chain fixed to the ringbolt on the bed frame rattled up from the mattress, weaving in the air as if it were a charmed serpent, the manacle like a cobra’s head poised to bite.