A ginger-jar nightstand lamp levitated, its cord taut. The plug pulled from the wall socket. The lamp flew past my head, shattering against a wall, showering Kristen with ceramic shards.
In spite of all their violent thrashing and vindictive wrath, poltergeists cannot control the malevolent energy that issues from them, cannot target anyone or aim with precision. They are able to harm us only by indirection, by ricochet, by the luckiest of lucky blows. If, however, a flung fireplace poker spears through your eye, through your brain, and out the back of your head, the fact that it found you by sheerest chance will not be much consolation.
Roberta began to scream and Kristen joined her, which seemed to inspire the late, unlamented Kurt to new heights of supernatural ire. The mattress flipped off the bed, and the coils of steel in the box springs sang as though something with a thousand claws plucked and strummed them. Emptied of all its drawers, the highboy lurched away from the wall, rocked to its left, rocked to its right, as if it were the Frankenstein’s monster of furniture, lumbering this way and that in search of a victim, before it suddenly rocketed to the ceiling with such force that it broke apart and brought down with it a hail of shattered plaster.
Over the cacophony, Stormy called to me: “Do something!”
“Do what?” I shouted.
“How would I know? I work in an ice-cream shop.”
“Do something!” Kristen demanded.
“I’m just a fry cook,” I lied. “I don’t know what’s happening here.”
The twanging steel coils in the box springs began to break free from their ties, unwinding as they tore loose, ripping through the covering fabric like baby snakes emerging from a nest, greeted by the manacle-and-chain serpent that still undulated like a cobra in the thrall of flute music.
Five
The ceiling joists creaked and shuddered. Cracks appeared in the plaster overhead, from which a powdery debris rained down upon us. Within the walls of the room, the studs groaned as though they might buckle under some tremendous weight, and underfoot the floor began to thrum, so that I thought the room might implode upon us.
Kurt’s angry spirit, a poltergeist of singular power unique in my experience, whirled like a tornado, careening around the debris-littered bedroom, vanishing into—and reappearing out of—the walls. He passed through the door, and when an instant later he rushed back into the bedroom, he split the door in two. The portion on hinges swung open, and the other half crashed to the floor.
None of us needed prompting. We rushed across the fallen half of the door, into the upstairs hallway, and sprinted toward the stairs. Retreating from a poltergeist is not cowardly any more than running with the bulls in Pamplona is courageous; the former is an act of reasoned prudence, and the latter is foolishness bordering on lunacy. I am pleased to report that, in my haste to escape Kurt’s wrathful spirit, I only considered muscling ahead of the three women, but in fact followed them through the door, down the stairs, and out of the house. Chivalry lives.
We departed by the front door and reached the yard in time to hear what sounded like second-floor windows exploding at the back of the house and a shower of glass raining upon the porch roof there. The thump-bang-rattle of Kurt’s postmortem temper tantrum continued in our absence, though I hoped that in spite of his singular power, he would be unable to follow us. Having initiated its frenzied destruction, the average poltergeist thrashes mindlessly until exhausted, whereupon it wanders off into whatever purgatorial zone serves as its retreat between our world and the next, perhaps for a while as confused as any living person with advanced dementia.
Roberta’s trembling right hand spidered across her face as if she expected to discover bleeding lacerations, and when she found nothing, she wrapped her pale bruised arms around herself, shivering as if the Mojave were as cold as the Alaskan tundra. “It’s him,” she said. “Ain’t no way it’s anythin’ else.”
“Him who?” Kristen asked. “What’re you talking about?”
“I chopped him with the cleaver, so he come back for revenge.”
“Came back from the dead?” Kristen said. “I don’t believe in ghosts.”
“I believe in what I seen,” Roberta insisted.
“There’s a word for a destructive spirit,” I said. “Something like…polyanthus.”
“That’s a flower,” Stormy said.
“Or maybe it’s poltroon.”
“That’s a craven coward,” she said.
“Polonaise?”
“A Polish dance.”
“Well, I’m just a fry cook.”
The fracas on the second floor seemed to be winding down.
“Poltergeist,” said Roberta.
“No,” I said, “I don’t think that’s it.”
“That’s it, all right,” Stormy said.
“Poltergeist,” Roberta insisted.
I shook my head. “No, I don’t think so.”
Kristen looked at me as if I were a candidate for the Idiots’ Hall of Fame, which was a look that I had seen before on the faces of a number of pretty girls. “What the hell’s wrong with you? Of course it’s poltergeist.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in ghosts,” I said.
“I don’t. We’re not talking about what happened up there. We’re just talking about a word.”
“Well,” I said, “if it wasn’t a pollinosis up there, then what was it?”
“Hay fever,” Stormy said, defining the word pollinosis.
“Poltergeist,” Roberta repeated. “But we ain’t never gonna say what it was, if we know what’s good for us.”
“Polonium,” I suggested.
Stormy said, “A radioactive element.”
The battered woman continued: “What we best say is Kurt done trashed the room while alive. Knocked me around some, too, give me all these bruises, black eye. Then he tried takin’ Kristen out to the shed, to the old cold cellar deep down under, where he done killed poor Hannah and hung her body, where he’d soon of killed and hung me, too. We say how I caught up with him, me all crazy with fear, and my mind snapped, and I chopped him to save Kristen.”
Beginning to shake violently again, Roberta broke into tears.
Kristen put an arm around her and said, “You saved me.”
In the house, all had gone quiet.
Before either of the women could start to wonder why Stormy and I had shown up in the first place, my girl said, “It’s over now. You two wait here. We’ll drive out to the highway, where there’s cell-phone service, and we’ll call the police.”
In my experience, the spirits of truly evil people didn’t linger long in this world, if at all. When they were reluctant to cross to the Other Side, they were soon taken across against their will, as if by a bill collector for some lender to whom they owed a big debt.
Because I couldn’t share that knowledge with these women without blowing my fry-cook cover, I worried that we were leaving them in a state of high anxiety. “Will you be all right here? The sun’s pretty hot. You could move onto the shade of the porch. It’ll be safe on the porch.”
“I’ll keep myself right here,” Roberta said, “and to hell with the porch.”
“It’s over now,” I assured them. “It really is. Or you could move into the shade of the cottonwoods. I mean, if you don’t think the porch is safe. But it is safe. The porch, I mean.”
Kristen regarded me with a mix of pity and exasperation. To Stormy, she said, “Do you usually drive or does he?”
“I will,” Stormy said. “Let’s go, Oddie.”
Stormy and I started toward the cottonwoods, but then I had to hurry back to Roberta to return her rolling pin. I didn’t look at Kristen again.
Six
While Stormy drove us to the fairground, I called Chief Wyatt Porter, who was something of a surrogate father to me, and told him what had happened, when, and where. As usual, he would do his best to keep me out of the official story.
In the fairground parking lot, Stormy wanted to
sit in silence, with the windows up and the air conditioner running. We watched the late-afternoon light darkle from peach to apricot to cherry, and after a few minutes she closed her eyes, whereupon I looked not at the colorful western sky but at her.
Eventually she said, “When high school’s over and real life starts, can you go on being a fry cook?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“With everything…everything else in your life?”
“Because of everything else, being a fry cook keeps me sane.”
“Sooner or later, it’s all going to overwhelm you—what you see, what you can do, what you are.”
“I’m getting a better handle on it all the time,” I assured her. “If my messed-up parents couldn’t drive me crazy, I’m not going to go nuts just because I can see the lingering dead.”
“And have prophetic dreams.”
“Not a big deal.”
“And have psychic magnetism,” she said, referring to another gift of mine that played no role in that day’s adventure.
After a silence, I said, “Maybe what you’re really wondering is if eventually it’s all going to overwhelm you.”
“Maybe.”
“I’m not an easy date.”
She said nothing.
The next silence was excruciating, and I became the one who at last broke it. “What I want most of all isn’t you. What I want most of all is for you to have a happy life.”