The Ghost in Love (19 page)

Ben rubbed his hands together. “All of this is my time, Ling. What I have to do is figure out how to get back to that
part
of it. But the boy over there might be able to help.”

“What's the matter with your dog?”

“What do you mean?”

“Look at him. He's been like that for minutes.”

Pilot sat at rigid attention by the front door, just staring at it. As if someone had rung the bell and the dog were waiting to greet whoever came in.

German Landis and Danielle Voyles sat on the couch in Ben Gould's living room, discussing what had happened with Stewart Parrish earlier.

“Pilot does that sometimes when he knows Ben's coming home.” Both saying this and phrasing it in the present tense made German feel strange. It was one of those small cozy details about living with Ben that she had forgotten. But now, having remembered it, the recollection made her feel even more alone than before.

“Is he?”

“Is who?”

“Do you think Ben is coming home soon?”

“I don't know. I have no idea.”

Seconds later the doorbell rang. Pilot stiffened and his tail thumped on the wooden floor.

German stood and walked to the door. Opening it, she saw a little boy standing there. He looked from her feet slowly up her body until his eyes reached her face. He smiled until his teeth showed. Something about me must really amuse him, German thought. His face was dimly familiar but she could not place it.

“Hello there. Can I help you?”

Ignoring her question, the boy said with admiration, “He said you were tall but, man, you're
really
tall.”

“That I am. Who told you I was tall?”

“You're name is German, right?”

“That's me.”

“I came to help you.”

“Cool.” She smiled. Did he want to sell her Cub Scout cookies or something? Did the Cub Scouts
sell
cookies? He was much too young to be a door-to-door religious proselytizer. How did Junior plan on helping her? This boy was a few years younger than her students. Perhaps that's why he looked familiar: simply because he looked like her kids.

Standing on the other side of the room, Danielle called out “Hello!” to the boy.

He smiled but his eyes were on the dog, which stood at German's side and was intently watching him. Pilot was not the kind of slutty canine that threw himself at every person who entered the apartment and covered them with slobbery, promiscuous kisses. Oh, no, not Pilot. He was a watcher, a considerer. He took as long as he needed to check out a stranger. Only when he was convinced the person was okay would he walk over and give him or her a sniff or a bump hello with his head.

But this young visitor was different, and that made Pilot even more cautious. The boy smelled like Ben Gould. To dogs, a human being's odor is that person's one-of-a-kind fingerprint. It is singular, constant, and absolutely tamperproof. Splash on a bottle of cologne, take four showers in a row, die, it makes no difference: beneath any olfactory camouflage, people retain their own aromas, unique only to them. In its entire life the dog had never, ever encountered two people who smelled exactly the same.

“Is that Pilot?”

Both the tall woman and the dog jerked on hearing the boy say the name.

“Yes, it is. How did you know that?”

The boy ignored the question again and looked past her into the living room. “And are you Danielle Voyles?”

“Yes, I am. How do you know
my
name?” She came over and stood just behind German.

“Because I'm here to help you too.”

“But who are you?” she asked in a pleasant voice.

Instead of answering, the boy said to German, “Your favorite song is ‘Under My Thumb.' ” Turning to Danielle, he said, “And your favorite song is ‘What if I Can't Say No Again,' right?”

Simultaneously the women scowled, because he was correct. They had just been talking about their favorite music a few minutes earlier. Anything to take their minds off what was going on.

Still looking at Danielle, he continued, “You snore at night but it's a nice sound. It's funny, because it sounds like a quiet growl. That's what your boyfriend said.”

The boy asked for a glass of water.

German wanted to stay and ask him questions, but at the moment she was so flummoxed that she was glad for an excuse to go. A
round trip to the kitchen now would give her time to regroup her thoughts.

Walking through the living room to get the boy his drink, she passed one large window and then a second. On the ledge of the second window were three photographs in stylish walnut frames. She had given them to Ben when they lived together. Before that, the pictures they held had sat inside cheap red plastic frames he'd bought years before at a dime store. Every time German saw them it annoyed her, because she knew how important those photos were to her new boyfriend. One day she bought three expensive frames, placed the pictures inside, and without any ceremony returned them to their places on the windowsill. Ben noticed immediately. She was surprised at how touched he was by what she considered a small gesture. He loved those photographs, but even more he loved her thoughtfulness and the way she made the change without bringing it to his attention. Danielle had looked at each of the pictures earlier and smiled.

The first one was of Ben's family sitting around a picnic table. It was raining and they all wore rain gear. The second was of his beloved grandmother a few years before she died. In the picture she wore a blue Chicago Cubs baseball cap. The third photo was of Ben when he was nine years old at summer camp. He was holding a bow in one hand and an arrow in the other.

German was several feet past the photographs when she stopped suddenly, blinked rapidly several times while processing certain information, then sort of moonwalked backward to look at one of them again. What she saw made her bite her lower lip and shudder all the way down her body. This picture and what had happened with Stewart Parrish earlier that morning said logic was now dead and all bets were off.

Two minutes later she was back at the front door. Handing a full glass of cold water to the boy, she asked, “You're Ben, aren't you?”

“Thank you. Yes, I am.”

“How old are you?”

“Eight.” He drank all of the water in a few loud glugs.

“Where's Big Ben?”

Danielle looked at German as though she were crazy.

The boy stepped into the apartment. “I have to come in if I'm going to help you.”

Half an hour later
he said he was hungry, so German made him a fat peanut butter sandwich. She remembered to put it on white bread and cut off the crusts, because Ben disliked bread crusts. There was also a can of root beer in the back of the almost-empty refrigerator, because all his life he had liked the drink, so she gave that to the boy too.

They all sat at the kitchen table, the two women watching little Ben Gould devour the sandwich and unself-consciously belch his way through swallowing soda much too fast. He seemed very pleased with himself after every burp.

“So, Ben, how did you get here?”

Through a very visible mouthful of gummy tan peanut butter, he managed to say, “I rode a song.”

“You wrote a song?”

“No, I
rode
a song. That's how I got here: I rode a song.”

“I don't understand.”

He shrugged, as if to say, “That's your problem.”

Working to keep the impatience out of her voice, German asked, “Could you explain it to me?”

He put the sandwich down and took a long swig of root beer.
“You like that song ‘Under My Thumb.' When it came on the radio, I rode it here.”

“But how? How do you ride a song? What does that mean?”

“I don't know; you just do it. It's real simple.”

“Where did you come from? Where were you before here?”

“Crane's View.”

German had earlier told Danielle that that was the name of the town in upstate New York where Ben had grown up.

“You
rode
a song from Crane's View to here?”

“Yeah, I already told you.” He pushed the last piece of sandwich into his mouth and shook the soda can to hear if there was any more left inside. “You want me to show you how to do it? Have you got a radio here?”

“On top of the fridge.”

Although he'd been talking to German, the boy turned and looked at Danielle. “Turn it on and find a song you remember. One from when you were little.”

Danielle shoved her chair back and stood up. She walked over to the refrigerator and switched on the radio. Twisting the round dial, she surfed quickly across a sea of stations while German and little Ben watched her.

“What am I searching for?”

“A song you remember from back when you were a little kid.”

Because her back was to them, they didn't see Danielle smirk at the slim chance of
that
ever happening. As a child, she was almost never allowed to listen to music in the house. Her parents were devout Jehovah's Witnesses who firmly disapproved of “the sound of other singing.” As a result, the family radio was turned on only so that they could listen to worship services broadcast from California
that her parents particularly enjoyed. The only song Danielle really remembered from her childhood besides the ones in the
Sing Praises to Jehovah
hymnbook was the famous spiritual “Oh Happy Day.”

As she kept surfing through the radio channels, she thought what a wild fluke it would be to find that one song on the radio right now.

After waiting awhile, German turned her attention back to Ben. “How did
you
do it?”

There was a loud crash in the living room. Glass—a huge crash and tinkle of breaking glass. The three looked at one another with expressions that asked, What was
that
?

They didn't have long to wait. Seconds later, a white animal charged into the room and went right for the boy. Little Ben screamed but the women were too amazed to do anything.

The boy leapt from his chair, ran across the kitchen, and climbed straight up a wall. Like a spider, he scuttled up the smooth surface on all fours. To cross the room, he'd had to brush past Danielle, who was standing next to the refrigerator, her hand still on the radio dial. She could still feel his touch long after he had climbed the wall.

The white dog—or was it a dog?—stood directly below young Ben and gazed up at him as if he were dinner. Neither of them made a sound. The boy's eyes staring down were hot with rage and fear. The dog's large eyes were calm. It did not have ears.

Danielle sidestepped away from the refrigerator and moved slowly back toward the table and German. All three sets of eyes were on the boy perched high up on the wall. His eyes darted back and forth between them but always returned to the white animal.

In time, little Ben began to move farther up the wall and then out onto the kitchen ceiling. On reaching the middle, he stopped. Dropping his head back, he looked down at them again.

Pilot chose that moment to enter the kitchen, curious at all the racket. After the craziness earlier with the half-dead man, running away, and then flying back, the dog had gone into the bedroom to take a restorative nap while the humans talked. What he saw now was the two women, a white verz, and the boy who smelled like Ben hanging upside down from the ceiling. Pilot had never seen a human being hanging from the ceiling before. The dog exchanged glances and a silent hello with the verz. Pilot did not need to smell the other animal's behind to obtain information. He already knew that all verzes' behinds smelled exactly the same. Neither did he need to ask why the thing was there, because verzes were like ambulances: they appeared only when human beings were in trouble and needed outside assistance. What Pilot did not yet realize was that the women could see this verz.
That
fact would amaze the dog.

The hanging boy said something in an eerie, silky, sibilant language that neither the dog nor the women understood.

Pilot asked the verz what the kid had said.

“He knows I'm going to kill him and asked if he could choose how to die.”

“Can he?”

The verz dropped its eyes from the ceiling and looked at Pilot. “Not a chance.”

German was torn between wanting to flee and trying to do something to help little Ben. What made her hesitate was having seen the boy climb a
wall
and hang from the ceiling like a bat.

“How did you know I was here?” the boy asked.

Verzes speak through their eyes. “I saw you sneaking around outside. I assumed you'd try something like this, so I just followed you.”

Upside down, young Ben smiled. “You're clever. But it was a
smart idea of me to come here, you have to admit: pretend I was the boy and win their confidence. It got me into this apartment. In a few more minutes they would have been eating out of my hand. If you hadn't arrived, I would've gotten Danielle.”

To the others in the kitchen it sounded like a bunch of gobbledygook, lots of “s” sounds hissing down from the child on the ceiling.

“Now what happens, verz?”

“Now you fall down and I kill you.”

“I have a better idea.”

“Really? What's that?”

“Let me go and I'll tell you a secret.”

“Tell me the secret first and I'll consider letting you go.”

The boy grinned. “You're lying.”

The verz blinked twice. “You too.”

“You're definitely going to kill me?”

“Definitely.”

Little Ben asked in a sad voice, “If I am going to die, answer one question, because it's really been bugging me: Why did they send a ghost to help
him
but not one for
her
?” He nodded toward Danielle Voyles.

The verz said, “Because she doesn't need help. She's going to figure this all out by herself. Why do you think I came? Because she already sensed that something was wrong with you.”