From the Corner of His Eye (39 page)

Everywhere in the fabled city, calves and knees and magnificent expanses of taut thighs were on display. This brought out the dreamy romantic in Junior, and more than ever he yearned desperately for the perfect woman, the ideal lover, the matching half of his incomplete heart.

Yet the most enduring relationship he had all year was with the ghostly singer.

On February 18, he returned home in the afternoon, from a class in spirit channeling, and heard singing as he opened his front door. That same voice. And the same hateful song. As faint as before, repeatedly rising and falling.

Quickly, he searched for the source, but in less than a minute, before he could trace the voice, it faded away. Unlike that night in December, this time the singing didn’t resume.

Junior was disturbed that the mysterious chanteuse had been performing when he wasn’t home. He felt violated. Invaded.

No one had actually been here. And he still didn’t believe in ghosts, so he didn’t think that a spirit had been wandering his home in his absence.

Nevertheless, his sense of violation grew as he paced these now-songless rooms, mystified and frustrated.

On April 19, the unmanned
Surveyor 3,
after landing on the lunar surface, began transmitting photos to Earth, and when Junior stepped out of his morning shower, he again heard the eerie singing, which seemed to arise from a place more distant, more alien, than the moon.

Naked, dripping, he roamed the apartment. As on the night of December 13, the voice seemed to arise from thin air: ahead of him, then behind him, to the right, but now to the left.

This time, however, the singing lasted longer than before, long enough for him to become suspicious of the heating ducts. These rooms had ten-foot ceilings, and the ducts opened high in the walls.

Using a three-step folding stool, he was able to get near enough to one of the vent plates in the living room to determine whether it might be the source of the song. Just then the singing stopped.

Later in the month, from Sparky Vox, Junior learned the building had a four-pipe, fan-coil heating system serving discrete ductwork for each apartment. Voices couldn’t carry from residence to residence in the heating-cooling system, because no apartments shared ducting.

Throughout the spring, summer, and autumn of 1967, Junior met new women, bedded a few, and had no doubt that each of his conquests experienced with him something she had never known before. Yet he still suffered from an emptiness in the heart.

He chased after none of these lovelies beyond a few dates, and none of them pursued him when he was done with them, although surely they were distressed if not bereft at losing him.

The spectral singer didn’t exhibit her blood-and-bone sisters’ reluctance to pursue her man.

On a morning in July, Junior was visiting the public library, poring through the stacks in search of exotic volumes on the occult, when the phantom voice rose nearby. Here, the singing sounded softer than in his apartment, little more than a murmur, and also threadier.

Two staff members were at the front desk, when last he’d seen them, out of sight now and too far away to hear the crooning. Junior had been waiting at the doors when the library opened, and thus far he’d encountered no other patrons.

He couldn’t see into the next aisle through the gaps between rows of books, because the shelves had solid backs.

The tomes made maze walls, a webwork of words.

He first eased from aisle to aisle, but soon moved more quickly, convinced that the singer would be found beyond the next turn, and then the next. Was that her trailing shadow he had glimpsed, slipping around the corner ahead of him? Her womanly scent lingering in the air after her passage?

Into new avenues of the labyrinth he moved, but then back again, back upon his own trail, twisting, turning, from the occult to modern literature, from history to popular science, and here the occult once more, always the shadow glimpsed so fleetingly and so peripherally that it might have been imagination, the scent of a woman no sooner detected than lost again in the perfumes of aging paper and bindery glue, twisting, turning, until abruptly he stopped, breathing hard, halted by the realization that he hadn’t heard the singing in some time.

Into the autumn of 1967, Junior reviewed hundreds of thousands of phone listings, and occasionally he located a rare Bartholomew. In San Rafael or Marinwood. In Greenbrae or San Anselmo. Located and investigated and cleared them of any connection with Seraphim White’s bastard baby.

Between new women and needlepoint pillows, he participated in séances, attended lectures given by ghost hunters, visited haunted houses, and read more strange books. He even sat for the camera of a famous medium whose photographs sometimes revealed the auras of benign or malevolent presences hovering in the vicinity of her subject, though in his case she could discern no telltale sign of a spirit.

On October 15, Junior acquired a third Sklent painting:
The Heart Is Home to Worms and Beetles, Ever Squirming, Ever Swarming, Version 3.

To celebrate, upon leaving the gallery, he went to the coffee shop in the Fairmont Hotel, atop Nob Hill, determined to have a beer and a cheeseburger.

Although he ate more meals in restaurants than not, he hadn’t ordered a burger in twenty-two months, since finding the quarter embedded in the half-melted slice of cheddar, in December of ’65. Indeed, since then, he’d never risked a sandwich of any kind in a restaurant, limiting his selections to foods that were served open on the plate.

In the Fairmont coffee shop, Junior ordered french fries, a cheeseburger, and cole slaw. He requested that the burger be served cooked but unassembled: the halves of the bun turned faceup, the meat pattie positioned separately on the plate, one slice each of tomato and onion arranged beside the pattie, and the slice of unmelted cheese on a separate dish.

Puzzled but accommodating, the waiter delivered lunch precisely as requested.

Junior lifted the pattie with a fork, found no quarter under it, and put the meat on one half of the bun. He constructed the sandwich from these fixings, added ketchup and mustard, and took a great, delicious, satisfying bite.

When he noticed a blonde staring at him from a nearby booth, he smiled and winked at her. Although she was not attractive enough to meet his standards, there was no reason to be impolite.

She must have sensed his assessment of her and realized that she had little chance of charming him, for she turned at once away and never looked in his direction again.

With the successful consumption of the burger and with the addition of the third Sklent to his collection, Junior felt more upbeat than he’d been in quite a while. Contributing to his better mood was the fact that he hadn’t heard the phantom singer in longer than three months, since the library in July.

Two nights later, from a dream of worms and beetles, he woke to her singing.

He surprised himself by sitting up in bed and shouting, “Shut up, shut up, shut up!”

Faintly, “Someone to Watch over Me” continued unabated.

Junior must have shouted
shut up
more than he realized, because the neighbors began to pound on the wall to silence him.

Nothing he had learned about the supernatural had led him closer to a belief in ghosts and in all that ghosts implied. His faith still reposed entirely in Enoch Cain Jr., and he refused to make room on his altar for anyone or anything other than himself.

He squirmed deep under the covers, clamped a plump pillow over his head to muffle the singing, and chanted, “Find the father, kill the son,” until at last he fell exhausted into sleep.

In the morning, at breakfast, from this calmer perspective, he looked back at his tantrum in the middle of the night and wondered if he might be in psychological trouble. He decided not.

In November and December, Junior studied arcane texts on the supernatural, went through new women at a pace prodigious even for him, found three Bartholomews, and finished ten needlepoint pillows.

Nothing in his reading offered a satisfactory explanation for what had been happening to him. None of the women filled the hole in his heart, and all of the Bartholomews were harmless. Only the needlepoint offered any satisfaction, but though Junior was proud of his craftsmanship, he knew that a grown man couldn’t find fulfillment in stitchery alone.

On December 18, as the Beatles’ “Hello Goodbye” rocketed up the charts, Junior boiled over with frustration at his inability to find either love or Seraphim’s baby, so he drove across the Golden Gate Bridge, to Marin County and all the way to the town of Terra Linda, where he killed Bartholomew Prosser.

Prosser—fifty-six, a widower, an accountant—had a thirty-year-old daughter, Zelda, who was an attorney in San Francisco. Junior had driven to Terra Linda previously, to research the accountant; he already knew Prosser had no connection to Seraphim’s fateful child.

Of the three Bartholomews that he’d turned up recently, he chose Prosser because, burdened by the name Enoch, Junior felt sympathy for any girl whose parents had cursed her with Zelda.

The accountant lived in a white Georgian house on a street lined with huge old evergreens.

At eight o’clock in the evening, Junior parked two blocks past the target house. He walked back to the Prosser residence, gloved hands in the pockets of his raincoat, collar turned up.

Dense, white, slowly billowing masses of fog rolled through the neighborhood, scented with woodsmoke from numerous fireplaces, as though everything north to the Canadian border were ablaze.

Junior’s breath smoked from him as if he contained a seething fire of his own. He felt a sheen of condensation arise on his face, cold and invigorating.

At many houses, strings of Christmas lights painted patterns of color at the eaves, around the window frames, and along the porch railings—all so blurred by fog that Junior seemed to be moving through a dreamscape with Japanese lanterns.

The night was hushed but for the barking of a dog in the great distance. Hollow, far softer than the ghostly singing that had recently haunted Junior, the rough voice of this hound nevertheless stirred him, spoke to an essential aspect of his heart.