Burial (27 page)

‘An Indian spirit?'

‘More than likely.'

‘Could it have been Singing Rock?'

‘I'm not sure. You saw him here before so it's highly probable. I had the feeling that it knew who I was, and why I was here. On the other hand he was very weak, very vague and indistinct.'

She paused. ‘How did Singing Rock die? You never told me.'

‘I made a throat-cutting gesture with my finger. ‘Misquamacus — ah — took his head off.' I hadn't meant my voice to sound choked up. I hadn't realized that it would. But sometimes your emotions can ambush you when you're least expecting it.

‘Oh, Harry, I'm sorry,' said Amelia. ‘I didn't mean to upset you.'

‘It's okay, forget it. What's a little decapitation between friends?'

Amelia said, ‘The point is, if he died that way, that might account for how weak his spirit seems to be. When a person suffers a traumatic death that often makes them very restless and erratic spirits.'

‘He was always so damned pragmatic,' I said. ‘Can you imagine that? A pragmatic medicine-man?' I tried to make a joke of it, but I was already worried that all of those nightmares that had plagued me after Singing Rock's death would come creeping out from under my pillow again. I hadn't thought about the way in which Singing Rock had died for a very long time; and I didn't want to start thinking about it again. I had a sharp mental picture of it that never faded and never grew any less horrifying. To watch somebody's
face
flying away from you with an expression of total fear on it … to see them still looking at you when their head is ten feet away from their body — well, that's more than some of us can happily live with.

Amelia said, ‘I don't usually like to make uninformed guesses, but I'm almost sure that we're dealing with some kind of Indian magic here. Either Indian or early Spanish. It has a completely different
feel
to white and European magic. It's very
pictorial
, if you know what I mean; and it's very much concerned with elemental things like fire and water, darkness and light, wind and rain.

‘Indian magic is the magic of life and death — whereas white man's magic is usually all about things like money and revenge on your employer and making people love you. “O Great Satan, I want to be irresistible to men.” Indians are much more concerned with basic survival.'

‘The noble savage strikes again,' I remarked.

‘Not so noble in this case,' said Amelia. ‘Those two men we saw in there were the victims of a recent murder. It wasn't any ordinary murder, either. They were killed in such a way that neither their bodies nor their souls will ever be able to rest. They will suffer that torture for ever. Even if we manage to find out what's going on, and what commands they were given, we will never be able to release them. To be released, you need either a whole body or a whole spirit They don't have
either
.'

‘What do you mean?' asked Karen, in bewilderment.

‘I mean that whoever killed them didn't just take their bodies to pieces. It took their souls to pieces, too.'

‘Is that
possible
?'

‘I wouldn't have thought so not until now. But I don't know yet what kind of force this is. You mentioned a shadow.'

‘Yes,' I told her. ‘But this time I didn't sense the shadow so strongly. It was there, hovering in the background, but that was all.'

‘In that case it was probably away someplace else, working out its temper on somebody else. Just as well, too.'

Karen said, ‘What about the furniture? Do you have any idea why all the furniture slid across the room like that?'

‘I don't know,' said Amelia. ‘I've been thinking about that. The last time I saw anything like that was in a house in Poughkeepsie, years and years ago when I first started contacting the spirits.

‘The owner of the house was a man called Grant. He was a real psycho. He killed one of his daughters by pressing her face onto an electric hotplate.'

‘Oh,
no
, I don't believe it,' said Karen.

‘Oh, people do worse,' said Amelia. ‘Mr Grant said he was only trying to teach his daughter a lesson because she was so vain about her looks. She thought she was God's gift to men. He wanted to see how sassy she could be without a face.

‘Anyway, I was asked to go to the house to help clear it, because after Mr Grant had been sent up the river the new owners kept hearing terrible screams in the middle of the night, and smelling a strong smell like burning liver. Yes, I know, it's disgusting, isn't it? But it was true.'

‘What has this to do with our two friends in the dining room?' I asked, glancing without too much confidence at Amelia's magically locked door.

‘I'm not altogether sure. But when I visited the Grant house I found that dozens of small objects like books and hair-ribbons and bobby-pins were all crowded against the skirting-board in the girl's bedroom. No matter how I tried to move them, I couldn't. As fast as I took one book away another tumbled back in its place. It then occurred to me that all of the objects were in direct line with the place by the cooker where the girl had been killed. It was like they were being
drawn
towards it; as if they were being pulled by a magnet.

‘I couldn't work out what to do about it, but a couple of months later I struck lucky. I met a professor from SUNY Utica Rome, Madron Vaudrey. One of his specialties was to see how many vital influences survived in the human mind and body after clinical death — such as the discharge of electrical impulses, the sending-out of viral codings, things like that Purely by accident, he had found that in
scores
of recorded cases, objects belonging to dead people — particularly objects that they had regularly worn during their lifetime — would measurably move towards the place where they had died.

‘He said that in his experience the more violent or painful the death, the further the objects would move. In one case, an eighty-two-year-old man was murdered by his two sons. After his death, his spectacles moved across the floor towards him, nearly twelve feet, I think it was. It was all recorded on police video. I don't know — it's almost as if, when a soul goes, it leaves a vacuum, and sympathetic objects try to fill it. Or maybe they're trying to follow their owners into the other world.'

‘But how about Naomi Greenberg's furniture?' I asked her. ‘It didn't belong to either of those two murdered men — George Hope and Andrew what's-his-face — not unless they were sent here from the finance company to repossess it, and that's not what you call “sympathetic”. So why should it move when
they
were killed?'

Amelia shrugged. ‘I really don't know. But what I do know is that they probably died on the other side of Mrs Greenberg's dining-room wall; and very violently. Maybe they were killed so brutally that enough negative force was set up to cause the furniture to move. After all, we're not talking about any ordinary kind of killing here. Those men were taken to pieces, and their souls put into
sokwet
. That means “eclipse” in MicMac. Total darkness in any language.'

‘What's on the other side of that wall?' I asked Karen.

‘That's a party wall,' Karen told me. ‘They share it with the Belford Hotel.'

‘So that's a hotel room, on the other side of there?'

‘I guess it must be.'

‘All right,' I said, briskly chafing my hands together. ‘The best thing we can do is go take a look.'

Amelia said, ‘Harry, you ought to understand how dangerous this is going to be. We're not dealing with poltergeists or bad-mannered demons who make you puke custard. We're dealing with some very strong and some very determined people who just happen to be dead.'

‘What about the shadow thing?'

‘I don't know. Maybe we could get some expert advice on that.'

‘That shadow thing turned Martin into a psychopath.'

‘I know.' Amelia looked tired. I was tempted to put my arm around her but then I thought about Karen and I decided that it probably wasn't the best thing to do, not right now. It was difficult enough fighting the wrath of a murderous shadow thing, without fighting the wrath of two women.

‘Come on, let's go,' I said; and we left the Greenbergs' silent and abandoned apartment to deal with its ghosts on its own.

The Belford Hotel wasn't quite as scabby as I had expected it to be. It wasn't one of those cabbage-smelling roach-infested flophouses you see in Robert de Niro movies. In fact it turned out to be reasonably clean and smart — the kind of old-fashioned family hotel that used to be favoured by travelling salesmen and out-of-towners who couldn't afford the Sheraton or the Summit. But it had an atmosphere, you know what I mean? An atmosphere of polish and disinfectant and sneaky peeking into communal bathrooms. Prim, but creepy.

A man sat behind the high mahogany reception counter, reading a book. He was sixtyish, with thick white hair and a bulbous nose and tortoiseshell eyeglasses that magnified his eyes like freshly-opened clams. He wore a well-pressed short-sleeved shirt with surfers and hula girls on it. When I stepped up to the desk he carefully took out a red leather bookmark, and folded it into the book. He was reading
The Clocks of Columbus
, the biography of James Thurber. I guess the guy was entitled to read anything he liked but somehow this struck me as incongruous.

‘Can I help you folks?' he inquired. I could see by the expression on his face that he was seriously hoping that I wouldn't ask him for a room for three: Mr and Mrs and Mrs Smith.

‘Well, we're getting a little tired of all the noise that we've been hearing through the wall,' I told him.

‘I'm sorry? What noise? What wall?'

‘We live right next door, and the noises we've been hearing. You'd think somebody was being murdered.'

The man took off his eyeglasses and laid them on the desk. ‘I'm sorry, sir. I don't know what noise you could be referring to. We run a real quiet establishment here. Some people think we're a little old-fashioned, to tell you the truth, because we're so darn quiet.'

‘Well, I'm sorry,' I snapped back at him. ‘I've been hearing noises like you wouldn't believe. Screams, yells, banging. It's been terrible.'

‘Where do you live, sir?'

‘Right next door. Second floor. I don't know which of your rooms it could be, but it shares a party wall with my dining room.'

‘And does your dining room overlook the street or does it overlook the back?'

‘The back.'

‘That's room two-twelve, sir. I'll have a word with them, when I see them. Tell them to keep the noise down.'

‘I think I'd like to have a word with them myself.'

‘I'm sorry, sir, you can't go up there less'n a guest invites you.'

‘Well, let me talk to them on the house phone, at least.'

‘They're not in, sir. I'm sorry. They're very rarely in. In fact I don't think I've seen them for over a week, maybe longer.'

‘Can you tell us their names?' asked Amelia, in her softest, most dove-cooing voice.

‘I'm sorry, miss. I'm not at liberty to give out private guest information like that. You do understand.'

‘All right,' said Amelia. ‘But is one of them called George Hope, and is the other one called Andrew Danetree?'

‘I'm real sorry, miss,' the man told her, shaking his head. ‘I'm really not at liberty to —'

‘Sir,' said Amelia, ‘if those are the names of the people
occupying room two-twelve, then there's every likelihood that those men have been murdered.'

The man's cheek twitched. ‘Murdered? You don't mean
here
, in this hotel?'

Amelia nodded.

‘What, are you the police or something?' the man demanded. ‘I think I need to see some ID.'

I smiled at him. ‘We're not police, sir. We're just concerned neighbours. Now, would you mind if we went up to see if Mr Hope and Mr Danetree are actually there?'

‘You can escort us, of course,' said Amelia.

The man looked hesitant I guess he was worried that we were going to take him upstairs and mug him. We did look slightly less than respectable, after all. We had sponged blood from our clothes, so that they were spotted with rusty-coloured damp patches, and none of us had been sleeping too good.

Amelia said, ‘It's just that we've heard such awful noises. We couldn't bear to think that they might be lying on the floor in pain, or anything like that.'

After a lengthy think, the man took down his bunch of keys, buttoned up one more shirt-button, and called to some invisible woman in the room behind him, ‘Alma! I'm taking some people up to two-twelve. Don't let those kids come in again!'

He came out from behind the counter. He had an artificial leg, so that he walked with a ducking, swinging motion, and creaked loudly with every step. ‘Damn kids,' he complained. ‘They come in here and they steal anything that isn't superglued to the floor. See that square mark on the wall? Last week they stole a steel-engraving of the Croton Reservoir. What's a nine-year-old kid going to do with a steel-engraving of the Croton Reservoir?'

We crowded into a tiny elevator that felt as if it had been designed by Mr Otis to fit into his daughter's doll-house.
The man kept creaking his leg and suppressing burps of gas. The elevator took about nine years to reach the second floor. Karen reached behind me and squeezed my hand, partly out of intimacy, I guess, but mostly out of claustrophobia. Amelia kept her eyes on the ceiling, as if willing us to rise faster.

The elevator doors juddered open. Then we were led along a gloomy, green-carpeted corridor lit by low-wattage bulbs. At last we reached room two-twelve, and the man gave a curiously old-fashioned Oliver-Hardy-type knock.