Saint Odd (30 page)

“I don’t know, sir. I don’t know anymore. Maybe they’ve learned that I can see them. Maybe they’re manipulating me by staying out of sight. See you soon.”

I terminated the call, stepped out of the half-bath into the ground-floor hallway, and discovered the gut-shot dead woman waiting for me.

The spirits of really bad people seldom lingered this side of the Other Side. When their bodies died, most of them seemed to leave this world as if sucked out of it by the largest vacuum cleaner in the universe. The spirits that lingered were those of people who were basically good, regardless of what faults they might have had in life. On the day of the shootings at the Green Moon Mall, not long before Stormy’s death, I had been confronted by the festering spirit of a man who’d been dead for a day and who felt that he had a score to settle with me. I had not since found myself the target of an assault by a ghost. Then the nameless girl in black, who had put a stiletto through my hand, suddenly appeared in the hallway and, no more subtle in death than in life, conveyed her anger by thrusting two fingers at me, the middle one on each hand.

The dead don’t talk, but they have ways of getting their point across. In addition to rude gestures and more benign pantomime, they can go poltergeist, especially the bad ones. I had lost a perfectly good stereo system to a poltergeist when I was seventeen.

I had learned not to show fear in these cases. My fear empowers them. She glared at me, but I stared calmly back at her and said, “Go away. Aren’t you eager to see what reward you’ll get when you cross over?”

Earlier, in the study, after she had thrown her malfunctioning combat rifle at me, her face had been twisted by hatred and anger. Because she had reminded me of the faces of the drowned people in my dream, I had thought I also read fear in her features.

At the moment, there was no fear in her, only hatred and anger so griddle-hot that it might have fried an egg. Yet still I thought of the floating dead in that submerged Pico Mundo.

She put two fingers to my lips, apparently to indicate that she would tolerate no further talk from me. The fingers felt real to me, as did the touch of any spirit.

Cat-quick, she clawed at my right eye, as if to tear it from its socket. But no spirit could harm a living person by touch, not even those that were more radically evil than this one. This world belonged to the living, not to the dead. Their clawing fingers and their fists passed through us. Their bites could not draw blood.

When she realized that she couldn’t blind or bleed me, her anger grew hotter, boiled into rage. Her beauty distorted like a reflection in a fun-house mirror. The deceptive look of childlike innocence that she had possessed earlier gave way to the truth of her: malice of an especially sinister and bitter degree, a venomous detestation of anyone who did not share her enthusiasm for cruelty, for murder, and who did not worship raw power as she did.

One option existed for some spirits to harm the living. If the malevolence in them was ripe enough, if they loathed every virtue
and celebrated every abomination, they were sometimes able to convert their demonic rage into a fearsome energy that they could channel into anything made by the hand of man. We called them poltergeists.

The woman thrust her arms full length, hands palm-out, as if she were some enraptured faith healer proclaiming her power to a tent full of the desperate and gullible, but she didn’t have healing in mind. Pulses of energy issued from her hands, visible but without effect on me, concentric rings of power that caused doors along the hallway to slam shut and crash open.

One of the two carpet runners peeled off the floor, undulated in the air, like some giant parasitic flatworm. It lashed the walls, knocked paintings off their hangers. When it flew at me, I ducked and felt it slap against my back as it ceased to be airborne and tumbled toward the kitchen.

The spirit herself exploded into frenzied motion, careening along the hallway, ricocheting from wall to wall, causing the lights to flicker and a groaning to arise within the walls, as if the wood studs were torquing behind the sheetrock. A table in the foyer rattled along the hardwood floor in a stiff-legged dance, and flung itself through the archway into the living room.

Poltergeists could express power but couldn’t control it. They were blind fury, thrashing torment. They could harm a living person only by chance.

Nevertheless, I could still be knocked unconscious by a flying chair or struck dead by a bronze statue that had become a missile. To die triumphant, after defeating the cultists, would be all right, even perhaps desirable. But after I had come this far at such cost, to be decapitated by a round glass tabletop, flung like a discus,
would be so infuriating that in death I might linger long enough to work off my anger with a little poltergeisting of my own, though I had nothing against the Ainsworths or their furniture.

The spirit did her whirling-dervish act, out of the hallway, into the living room. I heard bric-a-brac and light furniture and lamps being gathered up as if by a tornado, and I ran for the front door. A coffee-table book, a thick volume, flew past me, its glossy pages flapping like wings. Something cracked against the side of my head—a candy dish, which fell to the floor and shattered. I didn’t see stars, like characters did in those old Chuck Jones cartoons, but I did see scores of little dark spots swarming in my vision, trying to coalesce and drop me blind to the floor. I kept going, however, and my vision cleared by the time I went through the front door, crossed the porch, and stumbled down the steps.

I didn’t expect the spirit to follow me. Poltergeists usually thrash around like drunken politicians on a junket to some education conference at an offshore resort that is actually an anything-goes whorehouse. They exhaust themselves and wander off, having forgotten what they were doing or why they were there.

As I hurried to the stables that lay to the east, I thought the tumult in the residence was already subsiding. I shouted for Lauren, and after a minute she appeared in the darkness, wary and at first reluctant to switch on the flashlight.

“Where are the girls?” I asked.

The whites of Lauren’s eyes appeared radiant in the night, owlish, and her voice trembled as she said, “All the shooting.”

“It’s finished.”

Fortunately, either the spirit in the house had already worn itself out or its power had been spent to the extent that nothing more than pillows and afghans were being thrown around, the rage having faded to a hissy fit.

“What’s happening,” Lauren asked, “what the hell was that all about, the explosions, my God, the gunshots,
like machine guns
?”

“Where are the girls?” I asked again.

“I told them to wait, wait and be ready to run, till I was sure it was safe.”

“You can’t go back into the house. There are dead people in the house.”

“What dead people?”

“Very bad dead people. Four of them. Two on the patio. You don’t want the kids to see them.
You
don’t want to see them. Is there a friend, family, you can stay with?”

She looked bewildered but nonetheless poised, and I could see from where the girls got their equanimity. “My sister, Arlene. She lives over in the heights. But what’s this all about?”

“No time for that. Where in the house do you keep your car keys? I’ll go in and get them for you.”

“We keep them in the cars. There’s no crime around here to worry about.” She realized what she’d said, looked toward the house, then toward the huge gasoline fire in the distance. “Is it over, whatever it is?”

“No. We need to get out of here. You’ll have to drive.”

“All right.”

“You’ll have to drive
fast
.”

I was holding up my left hand, and she saw the bandage. “What happened to you?”

“Stabbed. Maybe I could drive your second car if I had plenty of time. But driving the way I need to, I’d pull open the wound before I made it to the county road. Get the girls, come on, let’s blow this place before something else happens.”

When Lauren called them, Veronica and Victoria appeared with Muggs, the Labrador retriever.

In memory I heard the dying woman in the closet.
You a dog. Oh, yeah, you a dog
.

The girls didn’t appear to be crying. Scared but stalwart. The dog wagged his tail.

The garage was a freestanding structure, separate from the house. We entered through the man-size door between two roll-ups. There were four vehicles. A Ford pickup with an extended bed. A Ford Expedition. A BMW. A 1947 Ford Sportsman Woody that Dave, her late husband, had fully restored and customized.

I thought Lauren would choose the BMW, for its power, but she wanted the Expedition. She told the girls to get in the backseat, buckle up, and keep the dog lying on the seat between them, so that he wouldn’t get hurt.

“When I say
fast
,” I told her, “I mean to hell with speed limits. You’ve got to drop me off at the fairground before you take the girls to your sister’s, and I need to be there already. Chief Wyatt Porter is waiting for me.”

The resort to name-dropping was a little mortifying. But nearly everyone in Pico Mundo respected and admired the chief. Some people incorrectly thought of me as a hero, but my supposed heroics were old news. I figured that Lauren was more likely to go to extremes to help Chief Porter than she was to help a fry cook who was, let’s face it, eccentric to the point of geekiness.

“Fast means
fast
. Yeah, I hear you,” she said, as she went
around to the driver’s door. “I use the Expedition a lot more than any of the others. I can make it smoke.”

I got into the passenger seat and closed the door. I drew the Glock from the shoulder rig under my sport coat and put it in my lap before engaging the safety harness. Then I picked it up, held it.

As she raised the big garage door with a remote, Lauren looked at the pistol, looked at me. “What’s going to happen?”

“I don’t know.”

In the backseat, the twins were saying, “Good boy, good puppy, brave puppy.”

Lauren started the engine. Popped the handbrake. Reversed out into the night. She turned the wheel hard, brought the Expedition around, shifted into drive, and powered away from the garage without taking the time to put down the door.

Lauren Ainsworth might have made a pretty darn good NASCAR racer. Considering the extent to which she combined speed with caution, maybe it would be better to compare her to an ambulance driver. I knew the Expedition would have plenty of power, but I worried about its higher center of gravity, which could be a problem with any SUV. If she cornered too fast on a road not banked quite like it ought to be, we had a higher chance of rolling than we would have had with the BMW. We hadn’t gone a mile before I stopped fretting about that, because she was in complete control, the Expedition a glove and she the hand within it.

Never taking her eyes off the highway, she said, “Who’s blowing things up, what’s happening at the fairground that you have to be there yesterday?”

“I need to think, Lauren. Sorry, but I need to think. I’ve got this brain-buster thing to figure out.”

“You figure,” she said. “Don’t pay any mind to me.”

The first thing I thought about was the woman cultist, how she had looked in the study, after she’d thrown aside the useless rifle.
Her face had been wrenched with anger and hatred. And yet she had reminded me of the drifting corpses in the dream, whose faces had been contorted in expressions of terror. Later, when she manifested in the hallway and went poltergeist, her hatred and rage had been still worse, demonic—and yet again I had thought of the drowners in the dream.

I remembered the last scene of that watery nightmare. The corpse of a little girl, maybe seven years old. Blond hair billowing around her head as the currents brought her alongside me. Her protruding, bloodshot eyes had rolled and focused on me. A froth of gas bubbles burst from her open mouth. And with them came a word:
Contumax
.

With that, I had exploded out of the dream, sitting straight up in bed, flailing at the sheets, heart racing. I had been terrified not merely by the vision of a drowned Pico Mundo, but also—and perhaps primarily—by that blond child who’d spoken the first word of the cult’s two-word greeting.
Contumax. Potestas
. Her expression hadn’t been one of extreme fright, had it? No. On reconsideration, her eyes had bulged and rolled like those of a maddened beast, and her expression had been one of white-hot rage, beyond rage, fury. But a child that young wouldn’t be a member of the cult. She had frightened me awake, but she hadn’t been what she appeared to be, hadn’t been a threat, had been instead a victim.

I thought of Connie, sister to Ethan, the young woman who had painted me as a harlequin at Face It. Raven hair and celadon eyes. She had been in the dream, too, a drowned corpse drifting in the eerie light of the submerged town. I went to the cauldron of memory and tried to conjure that part of the dream in my mind’s eye. The scene emerged: Connie’s face but not as she was in life,
as she had been in the dream of death. Either I had misremembered her expression when I woke from the nightmare, or I was misremembering it now, for this time I saw not choking terror in her face but extreme rage. And more than rage. Savage intent. Hatred. Agony, too. And anguish. And fear, yes, but the fear wasn’t dominant, as I’d previously recalled; it was only one element in an extraordinary mien of twisted and tortured emotions.

We had reached a more populated portion of Pico Mundo, and when Lauren turned a corner, traffic clogged the way ahead. At once she hung a U-turn, arcing back into the intersection from which we had just come, eliciting a Gershwin symphony of shrill horn blasts as indignant drivers gave her the what-for. She swung into a street that led in a direction we didn’t want to go, turned right into an alleyway that paralleled the jammed street and
did
go the direction we wanted.

She said, “How crazy do I have to be? What’s at stake, Oddie? Tell me what’s at stake.”