Burial (26 page)

She eased open the dining-room door, and there was all the furniture heaped against the opposite wall, including the bloodied chair to which Naomi had clung for so long. The living room had been warm, but this room was nearly fifteen degrees colder, and illuminated by the kind of blueish-green radiance that I had seen in my dream. The glow of death, the glow of decay. This room was something else altogether. This was a room where spirits had emerged into the real world; and where people had been mutilated and hideously killed.

Amelia took two or three very cautious steps into the room, then stood quite still and silent, looking around. I stood very close behind her. I could smell school and perfume on her clothes, one of her old favourite perfumes, Joy. I wondered for a moment how she could afford it on a teacher's wages, but then I remembered that MacArthur always used to send her a giant-sized bottle for her birthday, July 6, and probably still did. Just because somebody doesn't love you any more, that's no excuse for not sending them perfume.

‘I used to love that woman so much,' MacArthur had once confided in me, ‘I could have cut my eyes out, rather than see her going around with another man.'

But times change. And I knew from my own experience that Amelia wasn't particularly easy to get along with. People who are good with children tend to find it difficult to manage their relationships with other adults. MacArthur had been sweet and almost childlike, and maybe that was why their affair had lasted so long. Our affair, on the other hand, had been fractured and almost unreal, like watching an Ingmar Bergman movie in the wrong order. Or even the
right
order.

Tell me what happened,' said Amelia; and I told her. I didn't give her all the gory details, but I didn't really have to. She understood.

‘There was a shadow on the wall?'

‘That's right. I mean it
looked
like a shadow, but there was nobody standing in front of the wall to throw it.'

‘And what happened? Martin went up to the wall — and the shadow kind of joined him?'

‘That's the only way to describe it. It was like Martin and the shadow turned into one person. Martin went very dark, and his skin looked strange, and there was something weird about his eyes. They looked more like a photograph of someone's eyes than real eyes.'

Amelia glanced at me. ‘You wouldn't like to say whose?'

‘Whose what?'

‘Whose eyes they were. Were they Martin's, or did they look like someone else's?'

I tried to think. ‘I don't know, I —'

She covered her face with her hands
so that onlie ye Eyes look'd out
. ‘Think Harry. Think about Singing Rock. Were they
his
eyes?'

‘No … I don't think so.'

‘What about Misquamacus?'

‘The last time I saw Misquamacus was a very long time ago.'

‘Don't tell me you've forgotten how he looks.'

‘I've done my best'

‘All right,' said Amelia. ‘We'd better get down to it. I think it's safer if we form a conventional circle, all holding hands, than try to follow Martin's technique. Martin likes to enter the spirit-world like a potholer. I'm not sure that I have the courage to do that. I prefer to call the spirits and wait till they come to
me
.'

‘I'll drink to that,' I told her. ‘What about the table?'

‘We'll have to do without. The spirit will only drag it across the room, and heap it up with everything else.'

The three of us stood facing each other and held hands. Almost immediately I could feel an electric tingle go through me, as Amelia closed the circuit. She was always conscious of the spirits around her, all the time. Some days
they used to light up her brain cells like a telephone exchange. Personally, I would have hated to be
that
sensitive. It was irritating enough listening to other people's Walkmans, let alone other people's souls. I would have told them all to lie down and get some rest, but Amelia had once told me that many recently-dead people can't even grasp the fact that they're dead. They wander around Purgatory or whatever you call it, wondering what time's lunch, and when are they going to get out of these pajamas.

Amelia closed her eyes. I gave Karen a last reassuring wink and then closed mine too. I don't know why I was trying to reassure her. I had stood in this same room less than twenty-four hours ago, and seen a woman reduced to a grisly parody of a rubber-glove. My mouth was dry and my heart was cantering like a yearling. Bom-bom, bom-bom, bom-bom, bom-bom. They say that the second ‘bom' you hear is the echo of the first ‘bom', bouncing off the inside of your skull. They also say that one person's guts, properly dried and prepared, could be used to string every tennis racquet used in the Wimbledon Tennis Tournament; and let me tell you, they use literally hundreds of racquets every year.

I was trying to think of some more ‘Believe-It-Or-Not'-type facts — just to keep my mind off malevolent spirits — when Amelia suddenly said, ‘George Hope and Andrew Dane tree, room two-twelve —'

‘What?' I said. ‘Who?'

I opened my eyes. Karen had opened her eyes, too; but Amelia's were still closed. She looked extremely pale, as if all the blood had drained out of her cheeks.

‘Asked to meet me,' said Amelia, quite clearly.

‘Who asked to meet you?' I urged her.

‘George Hope. Andrew Danetree. Room two-twelve, Friday. Six o'clock.'

‘Amelia, who are George Hope and Andrew Danetree when they're at home?'

But although she was talking, Amelia didn't seem to be able to hear me. ‘I never knew your father. I thought you knew mine.'

I was about to say something else, when Amelia half-opened her eyes and looked at me. ‘Harry,' she whispered. ‘They're coming.'

‘But —'

‘Quiet, Harry, they're coming. They're very distressed.'

She closed her eyes again. I glanced across at Karen, but now Karen had closed her eyes again, too. Personally, I preferred to keep my eyes open. I'm not cowardly by nature. Cautious, maybe. Self-protective. But I could see shadows stirring on the wall. I could sense a cold, encroaching darkness. If Amelia was going to be possessed in the same way that Martin had been possessed, then I didn't want to be standing there with my eyes tight shut while it happened. I had many desires, many hopes, many ambitions. Being turned inside-out by an ill-tempered spirit wasn't one of them.

The temperature in the dining room dropped even further. I could see Amelia's breath fuming out of her nostrils. Her hands grew colder, too, and she clutched me so tightly that I didn't think that I would be able to prize myself free.

‘
I am calling on the spirits who are wandering in this place,
' said Amelia. ‘
I am asking them to show themselves
.'

I heard a very faint sound like a cat yowling. The atmosphere began to feel as if it were charged with static electricity. Bright steely sparks crackled from Amelia's hair; and Karen's hair began to lift, too, the way it does when you comb it too much. I felt an electrical buzzing sensation in my teeth, and pins and needles in my wrists.

Then — for some reason that I can't really describe — I began to feel seriously frightened. I'm not talking apprehensive or vaguely worried. I'm talking about the bowels melting, and the feeling that death was standing in the room with us. It was just like the feeling you get when you've
been wading in the shallows of a chilly lake, and suddenly the bottom shelves away beneath your feet, and leaves you shocked and gasping, out of your depth.

The air in front of me seemed to bend and distort. Again, I heard that cat-yowling sound.
Yarrrooowwwww
.

‘Amelia?' I said; but Amelia couldn't hear me. Her eyes were tightly closed and there were sparks dripping from her hair like crystal-bright raindrops.

‘Amelia?' I repeated. This time my voice sounded slow and blurred. ‘
Ahhhmmmeeeellliaaaahhhhh
…' But she kept her eyes closed; and she gripped my hand as tightly as before, if not tighter, and I knew that there was no disturbing her. She was closely in touch with the spirits, and even if it wasn't dangerous to wake her, it was damned difficult. The spirits demand so much attention. In their sad, frightening way, they're worse than children. They want everything, and they want it now. They seem to forget that they have all of eternity.

As I've said before, I'm not particularly sensitive myself. Psychically sensitive, that is — although you can show me a movie with kids in it, and I'll get all choked up before you can say ‘Boys' Town.' But Amelia was arousing something and I could feel it coming.
I could feel it coming
. It was tortured and cold and very strange and it was in pain.
It was in pain
.

It was writhing the way that a worm writhes when you crush it on a concrete path.
Wagging
, rather than writhing, so that I felt horror and disgust as well as sympathy.

It was a man. No, it wasn't. It was
men
— two men, butchered and grisly and eyeless. I could scarcely see them. It was like watching a broken-up image on a dying TV. There was blood and bone and I could see a stump-like arm waving. And those eyeless eyes, begging for sight, or begging for extinction. But then the image wavered and disintegrated, and all I could see was a vague outline of that
waggling motion, that hideous waggling, and hear those anguished voices. ‘
Yaaaooowwwwwww, yarrrooowww
— so agonized that they didn't even sound human.

In the summer of 1957, on the Sawmill River Parkway, I saw a station wagon burning, with a family inside. Father and mother and three kids. They were screaming for help, but the fire was so fierce that nobody could get close. All that anybody could do was stand around and watch the windows blacken, and the smoke roll up, and hope that the screaming would stop. My father had stopped the car and rolled down the window and stared for almost a minute without saying a word. Then he had driven on to Katonah, where my aunt lived, with tears in his eyes.

This was the same. This was real people, suffering more than people were ever meant to suffer. You can read about pain in the papers but when you see it and hear it it's something else.

Amelia quivered. Karen grasped my hand even more tightly. Amelia said, in the strangest of voices, ‘
Who are you? What did they do to you
?'

But then there was the highest of high-pitched shrieks, and for a split-second we saw a
face
hovering bright and foggy right in front of us, a man's face, just about to turn, just about to speak. He looked like a man in young middle-age, with a broad forehead and deep-set eyes, and maybe a moustache — although this could have been a shadow.

‘
Killing us,
' he blurted. ‘
Killing us
.' Then, ‘
Never knew … Hope and Danetree … never ever knew
…'

The head began to shrink, smaller and smaller, until it was only the size of a puppet's head. Yet it continued to cry out, continued to plead for mercy. It shrank so small that it was not much bigger than a point of light.

There was a moment of charged silence. I could feel through her clutching fingers just how tense Amelia was. Every fibre in her body was tightened to the point of
squeaking, like sisal cords tightened in a tourniquet. Then suddenly she shrieked out, ‘
Aaaaaaahhhhhhh
!' and the point of light exploded in front of us and we were sprayed with pints of warm, half-congealed blood.

Drenched, disgusted, we broke the circle. Amelia, wiping her face, said, ‘Quick — I want you out of here — please.'

‘This is
blood,
' said Karen, in disbelief, looking down at her black-sprayed blouse. ‘Amelia, this is
blood
.'

Amelia closed the dining-room door behind us and made a sign in the air that I didn't understand.

‘What was that?' I asked her.

‘Clidomancy,' she said, tight-lipped.

‘
Clidomancy
? What the hell does that mean?'

‘God, this is revolting,' she said, smearing the blood on her cheek. She went through to the kitchen and came back with towels so that we could wipe ourselves clean. I wiped blobs of jellyish blood onto a view of Niagara Falls. Next to me Karen was sickly silent.

When Amelia had finished cleaning herself up, she dropped her towel and then went back to the dining room and vigorously shook the handle. It was obviously locked.

She said, ‘Clidomancy is key-magic. My mother taught me how to do it. Lock, unlock. It's very easy. You see all these movies where people can't get out of the house because the doors have suddenly and mysteriously locked themselves … that's what it is, clidomancy, although of course not many movie-makers have the slightest clue that it is.

‘Keys are iron and iron is the metal of the gods. Iron protects you from demonic possession. Iron protects you from disease, too. And if you place a key on the Fiftieth Psalm, and close the Bible tight, and bind it with a virgin's hair, and then hang it by a hook, the Bible will turn and twist whenever you mention the name of somebody who has hurt you or stolen something from you.'

‘Don't tell me you really believe that,' I said.

She stared back at me without flinching. ‘Do you want to try opening that door?' she challenged me.

I hesitated. Then I said, ‘No, I guess not.'

Karen was drying her hands. ‘What
happened
in there?' she asked. ‘I was so scared!'

‘I'm not totally sure,' said Amelia.' But the moment I tried to make contact, I could feel a spirit reaching out for me. I felt as if it had actually been
waiting
for me to make contact.'

‘Do you know who it was?'

‘Unh-hunh. It didn't identify itself. It was strangely weak … but at the same time it wanted very much to help me. How can I put it? It felt like a guide. It felt like somebody who
belonged
here — somebody who knew this land and its history very well.'