Petrified (11 page)

‘The shadow I saw tonight was the same kind of shadow. You see that apartment block opposite? I saw the shadow crossing the windows. An
obake
. Then there was all of that screaming from the roof. You cannot persuade me that an
obake
did not come here tonight. I could feel it in every bone. An
obake
, or something very much like an
obake
.'

Afterward, she and Dan went back up to the roof, where the crime scene specialists were still trying to identify which grisly lumps of flesh belonged to William Barrow and which belonged to Chet Huntley. Everything on the rooftop looked as if it had been painted red.

Ed Freiburg came over with his bloody gloves held up in front of him. ‘This is going to take hours. I don't think there's any point in you guys hanging around any longer. I'll be in touch tomorrow morning.

He paused, and sniffed, and then he said, ‘By the way, we found Mr Huntley's head. It was lying in the parking lot at the Carpenters' Union on Spring Garden Street.'

‘My God,' said Jenna. ‘That's over a block and a half away.'

‘Well, that goes to show how hard that thing hit him, whatever it was. I surely don't envy your job, having to catch it.'

ELEVEN

Wednesday, 7:13 a.m.

B
raydon was woken up by rain pattering against the window and at first he couldn't think where he was. He sat up, blinking his eyes into focus. He was in a small, unfamiliar bedroom, with magnolia-painted walls and a framed print of ferries on the Delaware River hanging beside his bed. It was only when he saw the sign on the back of the bedroom door saying
Cell Phones Must Be Switched Off As They Can Interfere With Vital Equipment
that he remembered that he was in one of the relatives' rooms at Temple University Hospital.

He climbed out of bed and tugged open the drapes. Outside, he could see a rainy, windswept park, and pedestrians with umbrellas hurrying across a wide intersection. The clouds were ragged and low, and they were brown, more like smoke from a burning building than clouds.

He hobbled into the bathroom, splashed his face with cold water and combed his hair. He was wearing his T-shirt, his pale blue shorts and his socks, because he hadn't brought pajamas or a change of clothes with him. He had expected to be home before midnight last night.

‘Braydon,' he said to himself, ‘what the hell have you done?'

He lifted his red plaid shirt and his jeans off the back of the chair and got dressed. He was sitting on the end of the bed, lacing up his Timberlands, when there was a knock at the door and a large black nurse appeared.

‘Mr Harris? Good morning to you, Mr Harris. I was hoping to find you awake.'

‘What is it, nurse? How's my daughter?'

‘Doctor Berman would like to see you and talk to you.'

‘There's nothing wrong, is there?'

‘You need to talk to Doctor Berman.'

Braydon followed the nurse along the corridor and down in the elevator to the burns unit. She bustled along so quickly that Braydon found it difficult to keep up with her, and he began to feel that he was dreaming. He passed people wearing clear plastic masks, and people with strangely-stretched faces, and other people with their heads completely wrapped in white bandages, with holes for their eyes, like
The Invisible Man
.

When he reached Sukie's room he found that Miranda was already there, talking to Doctor Berman and a tall Arabic-looking doctor with wavy gray hair. Miranda immediately turned her back to him. That narrow, spiteful back.

Braydon approached Sukie's bed. She was sleeping, her face still covered by the Jaloskin mask, and he was relieved to see that her face looked less fiery than it had yesterday. He looked across at Doctor Berman and said, ‘How is she? Everything's OK, isn't it?'

Doctor Berman grimaced and rubbed the back of his neck. ‘Physically, she's doing as well as anybody could expect. But she's had a very disturbed night, in spite of being sedated. In fact we had to restrain her to prevent her from causing herself any further injury. Why don't you talk to Doctor Mahmood here? He's in charge of our psychological rehabilitation program for burns victims.'

Doctor Mahmood came around the bed and laid a reassuring hand on Braydon's shoulder. When it came to his personal space, Braydon was usually highly defensive; but he wanted to appear cooperative and reasonable, especially with Miranda here, so he forced himself to tolerate Doctor Mahmood touching him. Doctor Mahmood had tangled eyebrows and a hooked nose and his eyes glittered like two black beetles. He stood so close that Braydon could smell his spearmint mouthwash and a spice that could have been fenugreek.

‘Susan's mother tells me that she has always been prone to having nightmares, ever since she was very small.'

Braydon looked at Miranda's back. ‘Yes,' he agreed. ‘That's true. And mostly the same nightmare, every time. Scary things flying through the sky, like shadows. She calls them Spooglies.'

Doctor Mahmood nodded. ‘Of course, she wasn't able to tell us what she was so frightened of, because she was wearing her oxygen mask, but we could tell from her vital signs that she was in a high state of panic.'

‘I blame her grandmother,' said Braydon. ‘Her grandmother claims to be some kind of psychic, and she's always filling Sukie's head with crap about ghosts and spirits and dead people coming back as animals.'

Miranda whipped around and snapped, ‘My mother has
never
claimed to be a psychic. She's a
sensitive
, which is totally different! She can sense when something bad is going to happen, and Sukie's the same.
She's
a sensitive too. The trouble with you, Braydon, is that you're totally
in
sensitive, and you always were!'

‘Your goddamned mother is a goddamned witch. She even
looks
like a goddamned witch. And she's a fraud. If she can
really
sense when something bad is going to happen, why didn't she warn me on Monday that Sukie was going to get hurt? Like, Q.E.D.'

‘Oh, you think she's a fraud?' Miranda retorted. ‘She told me that I shouldn't marry you, and she was right, because it was just about the worst thing that ever happened to me. She told me so many times but I was stupid enough not to listen to her. If I hadn't married you, you wouldn't have kidnapped Sukie and Sukie wouldn't be lying in this bed with half of her face burned off.'

Braydon shook his head in disbelief. ‘You're even dumber than I thought. If I hadn't married you, Sukie would never have been born, would she?'

‘Yes, she would. I believe that some people are destined to be born, no matter what, and Sukie was one of them. She's my little girl. She's my mother's little granddaughter. The only disastrous thing in her life is that she has you for a father.'

‘Who else would she have had for a father? Not that asshole of a realtor you used to go out with? What was his name? Trenton. What an asshole.'

Doctor Mahmood lifted both of his hands and said, ‘Mr and Mrs Harris – please don't argue like this! I am begging you! You should be putting aside your differences and working in harmony to help your daughter to recover. If there is hostility in the air, patients are always aware of it, especially when they are very sick. Burns victims in particular need a very positive environment if they are to heal successfully. We have to nurse their minds with just as much care as their bodies.'

Miranda glared at Braydon. He could tell that she was biting her tongue to stop herself from spitting out another corrosive comment. He was almost surprised that she didn't have blood dripping down her chin like the vampire she was. She turned away again, and he could have put his hands around that stringy neck and strangled the life out of her, except that he probably would have needed to drive a stake through her heart, too.

‘OK,' he told Doctor Mahmood, although he was still breathing hard. ‘My apologies. I guess we're both pretty distressed right now.'

‘
Distressed
?' said Miranda, with a shrill whoop of mockery. ‘Distressed doesn't even
begin
to describe it! How about
shattered
? How about
totally destroyed
?'

‘Of course you are both suffering equally from shock and anxiety,' said Doctor Mahmood. ‘But that is why, for your Susan's sake, you both have to work very hard to reconcile your differences. It is highly likely that the antagonism between you two creates in her mind an emotional landscape in which these frightening apparitions can materialize. These
Spooglies,
as she calls them – in my clinical experience they may well represent the fear and uncertainty she feels when you two are at each other's throats.'

‘My God, if anybody's a Spoogly—' Miranda began.

But Doctor Mahmood put his fingertip to his lips and said, ‘
Sshh
! The watchword is compromise, Mrs Harris, and your sole consideration should be your daughter's well-being.'

Miranda blew sharply out of her nostrils, like an impatient mare, but didn't say anything more.

Doctor Berman said, ‘We'll be keeping a very close eye on Susan's physical progress, especially over the next five days. But we also need to keep her as calm as we can. If she has any more nightmares of the intensity that she had last night, we might have to consider a stronger sedative, which is something I really don't want to do.'

Miranda left without saying anything else, not even goodbye to Doctor Berman and Doctor Mahmood. A man whom Braydon had never seen before was waiting for her in the corridor outside. Balding, bespectacled, late thirties, in a putty-colored windbreaker. Another asshole, most likely. The man tried to put his arm around Miranda's shoulders but she twisted herself free of him.

Braydon turned back to Sukie. He wasn't surprised that she was having nightmares after being trapped in the back seat of a blazing vehicle. But he didn't agree with Doctor Mahmood that the Spooglies were anything to do with he and Miranda fighting each other. Sukie used to have nightmares about the Spooglies even when he and Miranda had been getting along well, before he had lost his job and they had lost their house and he had even lost his ability to make love to her. That was what had wrecked their marriage in the end: Miranda's feeling that he no longer loved her, no matter how much he had protested that he did, and his own feeling of impotence, both financial and sexual.

Doctor Mahmood said, ‘I think it is vital for me to talk to your daughter about her nightmares, Mr Harris – only when she is well enough to speak to me, of course. If I can help her to understand what they mean, I believe that I can help her to grow out of them. I think it will also help her to deal with the obvious trauma of your break-up with your former wife.'

‘All kids have nightmares, don't they?' asked Braydon. ‘When I was a kid, I always imagined that as soon as my bedroom light was switched off, the bathrobe hanging on the back of my door was going to come to life, jump off its hook, and try to strangle me.'

‘Eventually, though, you came to realize that this was not going to happen, and that your bathrobe was only a bathrobe?'

‘Who's to say?' Braydon replied. ‘The world is only what we perceive it to be, isn't it? And if Sukie thinks that Spooglies exist, maybe they do.'

Doctor Mahmood gave him an indulgent smile, and gripped his shoulder again. ‘All I ask, Mr Harris, is that you try to control your feelings of animosity toward your ex-wife – at least while you are both at your daughter's bedside.'

‘I'll try, doctor. But – as you saw for yourself – it ain't easy. Not by any means.'

He went to the hospital commissary and bought himself a large mug of black coffee and a lemon Danish. He sat in the corner, looking out over the courtyard in the center of the hospital complex, while rain trickled down the window. He had never felt so lonely and depressed in his life; or so guilty.

On the opposite wall a TV was playing with the sound switched off. A reporter for WPVI news was standing outside an apartment building in the rain. Behind her, there were five or six police cars with their red lights flashing and at least twenty officers in long yellow raincoats. The caption running along the bottom of the picture said TWO KILLED BY MYSTERY FLYING CREATURE: WITNESSES TELL OF ROOFTOP ‘BLOODBATH'.

Braydon could manage to eat only two bites of his Danish. He left the rest of it, and took his coffee into the relatives' waiting lounge across the hall, where there was another TV with the sound turned up. There were only three other people in it – two young men with shaven heads and tattoos who looked as if they had been involved in a fight, and an elderly woman who gave him a sweet but inane smile.

Braydon sat down in front of the TV and leaned forward so that he could hear it better. The news reporter was interviewing a woman detective in a purple rain-hat.

‘. . . what those witnesses saw?' she was asking.

‘Right now we're keeping an open mind,' the detective answered. ‘At the time of the incident it was dark, and whatever this thing might have been, it was flying real fast.'

‘But if it managed to kill two men, it must have been something pretty big, surely? And highly aggressive?'

‘Like I say, we're not jumping to any premature conclusions. Only one of the witnesses claims to have seen the creature clearly. The other two didn't see very much more than shadows.'

‘Well, we've talked to your witnesses, too, Detective, and even if they didn't see too much, they all said that it scared them half to death.'

‘If I saw a large dark shape flying past
my
apartment window, I'm sure that I'd be scared, too, especially if I was twenty stories up.'

Scary things flying through the sky, like shadows. She calls them Spooglies.

‘Can you tell us the extent of the victims' injuries?'