Cemetery of Angels (27 page)

Melissa’s cheerful voice came back.

“You’ve got a ghost. Maybe two.”

Rebecca could feel the hair rise on the back of her neck. And from somewhere came a shiver. She felt herself fighting off a sense of dread, one of which she couldn’t identify the origin.

Then there was a male voice. It was more distinct than it had ever been before. It was slithery, but clear. And Rebecca thought that it had a vague echo of a middle Atlantic state. Virginia perhaps. Or Maryland.

The voice called again.

“Rebecca… ?”

It beckoned. It summoned.

Rebecca went toward the open doorway. She slowly approached it. She felt herself thinking that she didn’t want to know who had opened it. She didn’t want to see anyone. She didn’t want to know who was in the room.

Nonsense, Rebecca, dear. Don’t be scared.

And yet, another part of her screamed out that she wanted to know. Another part of her was drawn to the room. One way or another, she knew she had to find out.

Doors didn’t just open by themselves?

Did they?

A hand is needed to turn a knob, even if the hand is invisible.
A thought shot through her head. Maybe we are all surrounded by invisible hands, turning the knobs and locks to our lives without our knowing it.

She was ten feet from the entrance to the yellow room. Then five. Never before in her life had a doorway loomed so large.

Rebecca drew a breath.

She looked past the door to what she could see of the empty room. All she could make out was some of the furniture that she had bought for her children. That and the windows and the walls. But deep down, she knew. Someone, something, some presence, was in that room. It was in there now, waiting for her.

Next, she pushed the door wide open, the feeling of dread now giving way to something else: a mixture of both fear and attraction, polar opposites tangling with each other, like the needle on a compass spinning wildly out of control.

The door went wide. There was sunlight in the room. She stepped in, expecting to see someone.

But instead she saw no one.

Didn’t see. But knew he was there.

“Ronny?” she asked softly.

No movement. But there was this sense of a presence that she somehow thought she recognized. Something familiar, as familiar as a kiss from a cherished lover. And her sense of being watched, that old sense that she had always had, was as keen as it had ever been.

It was more than fear that motivated her now. She felt that there was a pair of eyes upon her, a pair that she couldn’t see but which was closely upon her, like some feral beast lying in wait for a prey.

But where were they?

“I’m very near, Rebecca. Very near.”

An even more unsettling notion gripped her: if whoever had unlatched the door wasn’t in the room, he, or she, or it, was somewhere else in the house. But this thought dissipated too, giving way to an even stranger one. This one had words to it, almost like a voice speaking to her. And then she realized.

“Close enough to touch you. Close enough to embrace you.”

The voice was speaking to her. No way to ignore it any more.

“Come into the room, Rebecca, my love. Please come into my room and be comfortable.”

This voice that she heard now, and this low murmur she had heard on other occasions, were one and the same.

She stepped farther into the room. No one. But her feelings were ambivalent now. Her fear drifted away, like a bad headache that was suddenly lifted. And the turret room seemed to embrace her.

Her heart, fluttering as it had been, calmed itself and settled. She drew a breath again. She inhaled and exhaled, deeply both ways. She moved to the window and looked out. Now she felt as if she were in a trance.

“Am I mad?” she thought to herself. “Have I finally gone completely crazy? Have I finally slipped off the edge of sanity?”

“No, darling, no. You are quite fine. You have merely entered another plane, where I have waited for you.”

“Where are you?” Rebecca asked. “Who’s talking to me?”

“I’m near enough to touch you.”

She whirled, looking everywhere, seeing nothing.

“Then touch me,” she begged. Something did, and Rebecca jumped. Something like a breeze fluttered through her hair, gentle and caressing, soft as a kiss.

“Where are you?” she asked, her voice a whisper now.

“Promise not to tell? It’s our secret?”

“Where are you?” she asked again. “I want to know.”

“Go to the window. Look outside.”

Rebecca turned again. She looked through the window.

“I don’t see anything,” she said.

“Nonsense. You see everything! Concentrate!”

“But… ?” A whisper:

“Concentrate on what you see.”

She studied the landscape. The backyard was coming around to good shape, she noticed. The brick wall was looking better since her husband had worked on it. Above it and beyond it, the fallow territory of the cemetery lay beneath a calm sky.

Was that what she was meant to see?

Then she noticed something funny. There was a tiny shadow creeping rapidly across the rear of the cemetery, like the image of a cloud moving at a high speed. It came directly toward 2136 Topango Gardens.

It seemed to accelerate. It was heading straight toward her! She knew…

“Oh, God protect me!” she muttered.

The shadow crossed the fence and came across the back lawn of 2136 Topango. It came directly toward her home, and then it covered it. And when it did, she felt something strange, like an acute change in the atmospheric pressure in the room.

Then she had the sense again of a pair of eyes upon her, stronger than ever before. And she knew she was no longer alone in the yellow room. Nor had she ever been alone in that chamber.

“Now, my love. Turn… Now you may look upon me”.

Turning, Rebecca jumped. Her heart kicked so hard that it felt as if it were going to explode in her chest.

There was a man standing in the room, midway between her and the doorway. He had arrived in complete silence, which made no sense because all of the upstairs floorboards would creak beneath a footfall.

All Rebecca could do was stare. But there was no fear. Her fear was gone. Nor did she feel any menace. Instead, there was only an odd echo of familiarity, of attraction. She was reacting more on intuition now than logic, but also had the sense of having entered another world.

Words formed on her lips. She didn’t know where they came from, but she spoke them.

“I know you, don’t I?” she asked.

“Yes, you do.”

He was a handsome man, about six feet one with tousled brown hair and gorgeous dark eyes. He was simply dressed in a plain white shirt open at the collar. His waist was trim, and he wore dark slacks, and his eyes were settled upon her.

Ronny, she found herself thinking. So now I have finally met Ronny. He was just the way her children had described him. Somehow, perhaps intuitively again, Rebecca Moore knew she was looking at a ghost. The visitor’s lips moved. He spoke softly.

“
Rebecca
?” he asked.

Logic against emotion. Her soul split in half. Her brain against her heart. It felt like another explosion building up inside her.

“Rebecca?”
he asked again.

Now other words formed inside her. Her own words. Her own thoughts. Her response.

“What are you doing here?” was all she could say.

“I’ve come for you.”
She shook her head.

“No!” she answered. She shook her head a second time, now violently.

“No, this can’t be,” she insisted. “What do you mean, you’ve ‘come for me’? Are you telling me I’m dying? It can’t be my time.”

“That’s not what I mean. You’re alive. You have a long life in front of you.”

“You
know
that?” she asked.

“I know that,” he said.

She moved her eyes away. Her gaze traveled through the window and out across the brick wall, out to the distant grave stones, and it was her thought that somehow, somewhere, in a quirky universe, that some spirit had slipped up out of the earth and had begun to wander.

She looked back quickly, thinking that the man might be gone, and that she might have been hallucinating. But he wasn’t gone. And she wasn’t hallucinating.

“Talk to me, Rebecca,”
he asked.

“Where are my children?” she asked. His answer was a beautiful smile. “Do you have my children?” He didn’t speak. “Where are they?” she demanded. “Are they dead or alive?”

“They’re safe, Rebecca,”
he said.

Emboldened, she stepped toward the ghost. But as she approached him, he receded. He seemed solid, not opaque, and if she hadn’t intuitively realized that he was a ghost, she might never have known.

Then, before her eyes, he disappeared. She experienced something unlike anything she had ever felt in her life, something like a strong breeze or wind, carefully channeled and rushing right into her. She seemed enveloped by it, sort of like a gust of leaves sweeping past her. Yet this current actually felt as if it were sweeping
through
her, like a powerful positive emotion, though that was impossible in the world she had always known.

And yet again, when she turned in the turret room, the ghost was directly behind her, flickering slightly now, like an image in an old film.

“You’re a ghost,” she said.

“I’m a spirit,”
he answered.

“You’re dead.”

“You see me. Hence, I exist. I have life.”

“Why are you here? What do you want?” Silence from the visitor. Then…

“You were right, you know. You know me,”
he said.

She felt as if a bizarre window had opened into another world. Know him? From where? Yet there was something about him she couldn’t place, an aspect of familiarity that had an eerie edge to it.

“I want Patrick and Karen,” she answered.

“You’ll have them.”

“When?” He shrugged. “When?” she demanded. She took a long look at the intruder. “Where are they?” she asked. He smiled. “You have them, don’t you?” she accused.

The ghost didn’t speak. But it communicated an answer. Rebecca knew the response was yes. The next question was difficult for her. But she knew she had to pose it.

“If they’re with you, are they dead or alive?” she asked.

No answer. Instead, the ghost misted before her eyes, fading from a solid and tactile presence into nothing but empty air. He was gone in a matter of seconds. Yet Rebecca also knew the ghost was still there.

Somewhere.

She felt something like a gentle breeze flow past her. Then suddenly something was touching her bare hand as it hung at her side. She pulled back, not in fear but in surprise.

Then she realized that the touch was similar to a female child’s, reaching for a mother’s palm.

“Patrick? Karen?” she asked in the empty room. “Where are you guys? Your mom and dad miss you!” Another touch, or what seemed like one, on the other side of her. She turned in that direction, too. It had been a firmer touch. More assertive. A male child, she was sure. Patrick’s touch!

She flailed at the empty air. More nothing. Or nothing that she could see. But what had been there? Two small invisible hands seeking to hold hers?

Was she loony? And if her children were now invisible, if they had been turned into spirits, did that mean they were irretrievably so?

Dead in the middle of her thought, Rebecca heard footsteps on the stairs leading down from the second floor. It sounded like a man with two children.

She fled the turret room and went to the landing at the top of the steps. She looked to the spot from where the sound had emanated. She could still hear it. But she couldn’t see anything.

Then another thought came to her.

Go to the window, Rebecca. Look to San Angelo. Find comfort among the angels.

She walked back to the turret room, moving cautiously, her entire concept of reality forever changed. She moved to the center of the room and hesitated about going to the window. She was afraid of what she might see. In some ways, the sequence had a dream-like quality. She felt she was gliding rather than stepping; she had the sense of seeing herself as if from above, rather than living the experience directly.

But she found herself in front of the lone window in the turret room. Her gaze traveled through the backyard of her home and to the rear of the cemetery beyond. The moment that followed would forever seem frozen, a lingering still photograph, an image more than an actual event.

But she could not mistake what it was.

The ghost she had seen in her home now walked in the rear of San Angelo. It was unmistakably the same figure. He was clothed the same way and was of the same stature. Rebecca’s eyes went wide, however. The ghost was not alone. He walked hand in hand with two young children. Rebecca’s Patrick and Karen. They strolled as if with a father figure, and they walked back toward the burial area of the cemetery.

Rebecca held this view for several seconds, before she screamed.

She called out their names.

“Patrick! Karen!”

Their heads turned in response. Their cherubic faces illuminated with smiles. Ronny released their hands, and both daughter and son waved to her. But they voluntarily remained with Ronny. And they looked happy.

The children’s words echoed from the night of their disappearance.

“He wants us to come with him.”

She called their names again. They waved and walked farther with Ronny, back toward the tombstones. She called their names a third time.

This time they didn’t acknowledge. They were much farther away now, linked hand in hand with their guide. Rebecca watched them go. Like a bird or an airplane, disappearing on the horizon, they became harder and harder to see.

Like Ronny, they misted, flickered, and disappeared, long before they reached the burial ground. Another snippet of words came back to her, the message that had emerged on the wall from under the fresh coats of primer and yellow paint.