The Haunted Air (8 page)

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Authors: F. Paul Wilson

BOOK: The Haunted Air
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“You didn't feel a thing?” Jack said.
Abe shook his head. “Not even a wiggle. Some earthquake. A quakeleh, you should call it.”
Abe Grossman, dressed as always in a half-sleeve white shirt and crumb-speckled black pants, sat perched on his stool, legs akimbo, one hand resting on his ample belly while the other guided a large piece of crumb cake into his mouth.
Jack leaned on the customer side of the scarred counter at the rear of Abe's store, the Isher Sports Shop. The morning papers lay scattered between them. It had become an irregular tradition of sorts, now and then during the week, but almost always on Saturday and Sunday mornings: Abe bought the papers, Jack brought breakfast.
Jack ran his finger down a column of type on page three of the
Post
and stopped when he found what he wanted.
“Says here the epicenter was located in Astoria. How about that? Gia and I were at ground zero.”
“Ground less than zero, maybe,” Abe said with a dismissive shrug. “No fires, no injuries, no
tumel.
This is a quake?”
“They clocked it at two-point-five Richter—about the same as the one that hit the East Eighty-fifth Street area in early ‘01.”
“Another nonevent, as I remember.” He pointed to the crumb cake. “You're not having?”
“I, uh, brought something different.”
Jack pulled a sausage McMuffin from the sack; his mouth watered as he unwrapped it. He waited for the reaction. Took about two nanoseconds.
“What's this? Meat? Juicy meat for you and for your old friend Abe a fat-free coffee cake?”
“You don't need the meat. I do.”
“Says who?”
“I do. And I thought you were trying to lower your cholesterol.”
“You're
trying to lower my cholesterol.”
True enough, Jack admitted. But only because the guy was riding the heart attack express, and Jack wanted him around for a lot more years—as many as possible.
“And even if I was,” Abe said, “I should get a second-class breakfast on a Saturday morning?” He stuck out a hand. “Give. Just a
bisel.
A
biseleh.”
“Once you get into shape, I'll go out and buy you a whole—”
“What?” He patted his belly. “A sphere is not a shape?”
“Okay then, how about I buy you a sausage McMuffin when you can touch your toes?”
“If God wanted us to touch our toes he'd have put them on our knees.”
There was no reasoning with this man. “Forget exercise. Forget cholesterol. I get the sausage because I have a special need.”
“And that would be?”
“Last night we went to a party. But before the party we went out to eat, so to speak, at Zen Palate.”
Abe made a face. “
Nebach
! Where they serve tofu in the shape of a turkey?”
“I don't remember seeing that.”
“Stop by on Thanksgiving. Gia's idea, I assume.”
“Yeah, well, she's off meat, you know.”
“Still?”
“Yeah, and she wanted to try it.”
“
Nu
? What kind of tofu did you have?”
“Fried.”
“Fried is best. At least you're sure it's dead.”
“Even worse: they don't serve alcohol. Had to pop out to the deli on the corner to get some beer.”
“Should have grabbed a pastrami on rye while you were there.”
Jack remembered the dirty looks he'd gotten from the couple at the next table when he'd popped the top on a forty of Schlitz. Imagine if he'd unwrapped a pastrami, or a cheesesteak. The horror.
“Tell me about it. I've been obsessing on meat ever since. So when I passed McDonald's this morning I couldn't resist.”
“In that case I won't insist on a share. Eat. You deserve it after suffering through Zen Palate.”
Jack wolfed down the sandwich without looking at Abe. Out of consideration he should have finished it before stepping through the door. Next time …
“Look at this,” he said around a mouthful as he tried to move the conversation away from food. “A major fault runs right up the East River.”
“So? There are a number of major faults on the local school board.”
“No, seriously.” Jack traced the fault line with his fingertip. “Says here it's called Cameron's Line. Supposedly it's where the continental plate of Africa bumped the North American plate.”
“Nobody tells me anything. When did this happen?”
“About 320 million years ago. You were just a kid then. Says the fault line runs from Staten Island up into Connecticut and Massachusetts. But look here.” He angled the page so Abe could see. “It makes a detour from the East River right through the heart of Astoria, then loops back to the river.” Wonder filled him. “I'll be damned. That psychic's house sits right atop Cameron's Line.”
“Psychic's house?” Abe said. “You're not—”
“Not a chance,” Jack sad. “It was a lark of sorts.”
He recounted Junie Moon's quest for her lost bracelet.
Abe shook his head. “The dumbing of America: government-accredited schools of astrology, school boards deciding to teach creationism in science, classes people paying hundreds of dollars for vials of water because someone labeled it ‘Vitamin O,' the return of homeopathic cures—most of which are no more than Vitamin O—magic crystals, feng shui … Oy Jack, I'm losing hope.”
“Well, you were never exactly Little Mary Sunshine to begin with.”
Abe had been predicting—and was well prepared for—a civil and economic holocaust since Jack had known him.
“But one should be able to hope. I'd always thought that as the breadth and depth of human knowledge increased, people would gradually emerge from the darkness into the light. A lot of us prefer the shadows, it seems.”
Jack said, “It's the whole New Age thing. Somehow it got mainstreamed. A bonanza for the bunko artists. But what I want to know is, why now? We were climbing out of all that mystical crap, but ever since the seventies it seems we've been sliding back. What turned us around?”
Abe shrugged. “Maybe science is the cause.”
“I'd think science would be the solution.”
“Maybe I should say it's a reaction to science. We're all looking for transcendence—”
“Transcendence.”
“A life beyond this one. A noncorporeal existence. In other words, we want we should go on. You believe in transcendence, Jack?”
“Wish I could. I mean, I'd love to think that some spark in me was going to go on and on, but …”
“What? You don't have enough ego to believe you're eternal?”
“To tell the truth, I don't think about it much. Either way, I can't see how it would change my day-to-day life. I know only one way to live. But what's this got to do with science?”
“Tons. The more science pushes back the unknown, the more uncertain transcendence seems. So people overreact. The rational gives them no comfort, so they toss it out and cling to the irrational, no matter how potty.”
Jack looked at Abe. “We both know there are things in this world that don't have an easy explanation.”
“You mean like the rakoshi.”
“Right. They didn't exactly yield to the scientific method.”
“But they were real. Don't forget, I was down there at the Battery when that one came out of the harbor. I saw it with my own eyes, saw it slice up your chest. You go through something like that, who needs belief? And you, you still have the scars. You
know.
”
Jack's hand instinctively moved to his chest and fingered the rubbery ridges through the fabric of his T-shirt.
“But a rakosh doesn't fit with what we know of the world.”
“True. But the key word there is ‘know.' I can't explain it, but maybe someone else can. A maven with special knowledge perhaps. I contend that everything is explicable—everything, that is, except human behavior—if you have sufficient knowledge. The knowledge part is critical. You and I both have some of that knowledge—you more than I because you've seen more of it. We know there's a dark force at work in this world—”
“The Otherness,” Jack said, thinking about how it had intruded on his life over the past year. “But that's just a name somebody gave it.”
“From what you've told me, it's not a thing; more like
a state of being. The word ‘Otherness' doesn't tell us much about it. Whatever it is, at this point it's unknowable. We do know that it can't be warded off by crystals and charms and it won't be summoned by incantations and sacrifices. So all the mumbo-jumbo these New Agers and the End of Days folk and the UFO cultists and all their fellow travelers immerse themselves in is useless. The real darkness in this world doesn't reveal itself; it abides by its own laws and follows its own agenda.”
Jack found himself thinking about his sister. He blamed her death on the Otherness.
“I never told you what Kate said to me just before she died. Something about ‘the dark' coming. She said the virus in her head was letting her see it. She said the ‘dark is waiting but it will be coming soon.' Said it was going to roll over everything.”
“With all due respect to your sister—and I should maybe never forgive you for not bringing that fine woman to meet me—she was in extremis. She probably didn't know what she was saying.”
“I think she did, Abe. I think she was talking about the Otherness getting the upper hand here. It sort of fits with scraps I've been picking up since the spring. The events after that conspiracy convention, hints from the guy running the freak show, and what that crazy Russian lady said to me at Kate's graveside, they all hint at the same thing: a bad time coming, one that'll make all other bad times look like a picnic. The worst time ever for the human race, worse than all the plagues and world wars rolled into one.”
Abe stared at him, his expression grim. This fit in with the civil holocaust he'd been predicting forever. “Did she say what we could do about it?”
“No.”
Kate had also told Jack that only a handful of people were going to stand in the way of the darkness, and that he was one of them. But he didn't mention that.
Abe shrugged again. “Well, then?”
“That's not why I brought it up. I'm wondering if maybe
people sense this darkness approaching. Not consciously, but on a primitive, subconscious level. Maybe that explains why so many people are turning to fundamentalist and orthodox religions—ones that offer a clear and simple answer for everything. Maybe that's why conspiracy theories are so popular. These people sense something awful coming but can't put their finger on what it is, so they look for a belief system that will give them an answer and a solution.”
“What about us poor schmucks who don't have a belief system to lean on?”
Jack sighed. “We'll probably be the ones stuck in the trenches dealing with the real thing when it comes along.”
“You think this earthquake had something to do with it?”
“I can't see how, but that doesn't mean anything. Lately I've seen too many innocent-seeming situations take a sharp turn and head into the can at ninety miles an hour.”
He thought about last night … and how that quake seemed to hit just as he and Gia stepped over the threshold of Menelaus Manor. He wanted to think that was coincidence, but it was not comforting to know that the house sat on a crack in the earth's crust, a direct channel down to a lode of ancient rock that was not resting easy.
He wondered if Ifasen was feeling any aftershocks.
“Now, if we will all place our hands on the table, palms flat down … that's it … when we're all relaxed, we shall begin.”
Lyle looked at his three sitters arrayed around the round oak pawfoot table. The two middle-aged women, Anya Spiegelman and Evelyn Jusko, had been here before, and he knew all about them. Vincent McCarthy was new. A
blank. All Lyle had known about him until his arrival a few moments ago was his name.
But now he knew a fair bit about him. And he'd learn much more in the next few minutes. Lyle loved the challenge of a cold reading.
“I want everyone to close their eyes for a moment and breathe deeply … just a few breaths to calm you. Turmoil interferes with spirit contact. We must be at peace …”
Peace … Lyle needed to be relaxed to do this right. At least the house was at peace. The windows and doors had stopped opening shortly before the sitters arrived. Now … if only he could be at peace.
Not easy after calling Kareena's apartment this morning and having a man answer, hearing him say Kareena was in the shower and ask if he was from the radio station.
He had to put his anger and his hurt on hold. He'd let Kareena screw with his emotions, he wasn't about to let her screw up his livelihood. Put aside the negative feelings and be positive … at least for now. Concentrate on Vincent McCarthy.
Lyle opened his eyes and studied him. He guessed his age in the neighborhood of forty, and knew he had a few bucks. His Brooks Brothers golf shirt and expensive lightweight summer slacks said so; so did the shiny new Lexus SC 430 hardtop convertible he'd parked in the driveway. No tattoos on his tanned forearms; no earring; just a simple gold band on the ring finger. And check out those fingers: clean, no calluses, manicured nails.
So we're dealing with a married, well-heeled white dude in his forties. He's come to Astoria to sit in a darkened room on a perfect Saturday for golf. That can only mean he's big-time worried about something.
Money? Not likely.
Business. Also unlikely. If Vincent is in business he either owns it or he's a high-up executive. He knows his way around a spreadsheet and a boardroom; he's not going to consult the spirit world about a territory where he considers himself an alpha male.
Marriage? Possibly. The skills that make him successful in the money end of his life do not necessarily transfer to the emotional side. He could be a klutz in the relationship arena.
Health? He looks well himself, but he could be worried about someone else's health. Wife, parent, or child.
Lyle closed his eyes and decided to go with health. Nudge around the perimeter with a series of try-ons and see what the man would reveal. If that didn't pan out, he could backtrack to the marriage, but he doubted that would be necessary.
“Since the spirits shun the light, we will make the room more inviting to them.”
Back in Charlie's command post, a little room behind the south wall that he'd packed with all his electronic gizmos, his brother would pick up Lyle's words through the tiny microphone hidden in the chandelier directly above, and act accordingly. Sure enough, the overhead bulbs dimmed until only the faint glow of a single red bulb lit the table area.
“I feel it,” Lyle said. “I feel the gates opening …” Charlie's cue to direct a little cold air at the table. “ … to allow us contact with the Other Side.” He let his head fall back, opened his mouth, and let out a long, soft, “Aaaaaaaaaaaahhhh.”
The sound wasn't all show. A good deal of it was real, a pliant ecstasy easing from his soul, like leisurely sex—
That he wasn't having.
Stop! Don't blow this because of a cheating …
Easy … easy … he reminded himself that this was when he felt most alive, this was when he was in control, when he ruled this, his little corner of the world. The rest of his life might be in chaos right now, but in this time, in this place, he called the shots. He was the master …
Master of illusion … that was his self-declared moniker in his teens. And he hadn't been stroking himself. That was exactly what he'd become after Momma died. Or rather, was killed. She'd been carrying a sack of groceries through
Westwood Park on her way back from the market, crossing the street with the walking green, when two cars out of nowhere, one chasing the other, trading 9mm slugs, ran the red and knocked her forty feet through the air. The hit-and-run bastards were never found.
To the rest of the city she'd been just another noncombatant fatality in Detroit's crack wars. But to Lyle and Charlie she'd been the world. Their father was a shadow in Lyle's memory and didn't exist at all in Charlie's. Dad's brother, Uncle Bill, used to stop by now and again, but nobody had heard from him since he left for the West Coast.
So there they were, the Kenton brothers, Lyle sixteen, Charlie twelve, all alone, existing off the help of the neighbors, but all too soon the Child Welfare folks came sniffing. He and Charlie could pretend no one was home for only so long before they missed one too many rent payments and wound up on the street or, worse, were split up and placed in foster care.
So Lyle decided to become his Uncle Bill. He'd been tall for his age then, and with the help of a fake beard and some make-up, he fooled the social worker. He still remembered Maria Reyes, MSW, a good woman with a sincere desire to help. She believed that Lyle was Bill Kenton; she believed that Saleem Fredericks—a friend from downstairs in the project he borrowed for the home inspection visits—was Lyle.
And Lyle learned something then: the power of belief, and the even greater power of the desire to believe, the
need
to believe. Ms. Reyes believed because she
wanted
to believe. She didn't want to split up the brothers; she'd wanted a blood relative as legal guardian, and so she'd believed everything Lyle tossed her way.
Or had she? Years later Lyle began to wonder if Ms. Reyes had seen through him all along. Wondered if she'd been taken in not by his performance but by his determination to hold together the remnants of his tattered family, and that was why she'd allowed him to become his own
legal guardian. Someday he'd have to track her down and ask.
Whatever the truth, sixteen-year-old Lyle Kenton had found his calling: the scam. If he could scam the city, he could scam anyone. His first paying gig was as a slider for a downtown monte game, watching the street for the heat, ready to make the call that would fold the game. He quickly learned the shaker's verbal codes and moved up to the stick position where he'd stand around the table and shill the marks into the game, but all his off hours he spent practicing the moves so he could become a shaker and start his own game.
But after a particularly close call when he'd barely outrun one of the plainclothes D's who'd broken up their game, he cast about for something equally profitable but a little less risky. He found it: a psychic hotline. An audition with a phony Jamaican accent got him hired. After a few hours of practice with a list of cold-reading questions, he joined the crew of men and women—mostly women—in a loft filled with phones and baffle boxes.
Everything he was taught had been geared to keeping the mark on the line as long as possible. First, get the name and address so the mark can be put on a mailing list as a customer for everything from tarot decks to fortune-telling eight balls. Next, convince them you've got a direct line to the Afterlife and the wells of Ancient Knowledge, tell them what they want to hear, make them beg for more-more-more, say anything you want but
keep them on the fucking line
. After all, they were paying five or six dollars a minute to hear psychic wisdom, and Lyle was getting a piece of the action. In no time he was bringing down a grand or better a week without breaking a sweat.
He—as Uncle Bill—and Charlie moved out of the projects and into a garden apartment in the suburbs. It wasn't much, but after Westwood Park, it was like Beverly Hills.
That was when he'd begun calling himself Ifasen—he'd found it in a list of Yoruba names—and developing a West African accent. Soon hotline callers were asking for Ifasen.
No one else would do. This did not endear him to his bosses, who were in the business of selling a service, not creating star players.
So in his off hours he started looking for something new. On a sunny Sunday morning in Ann Arbor he stumbled across the Eternal Life Spiritualist Church. He sat in on a healing session. The needle on his bullshit meter immediately jumped into the red zone but he stayed for the worship and messages meeting. At the end, as he watched one person after another write “love offering” checks to the church, he knew this was his next step.
He joined the Eternal Life Church, signed up for medium development workshops, and hit it off with the pastor, James Gray. Soon he was serving the church as a student medium, which meant he became privy to and a participant in all the chicanery. After a year or so of this, the Reverend Doctor Gray, a big, burly white guy who thought having a young African-sounding black man as an assistant added to the mystical ambiance of his church, took him aside and gave him some invaluable advice.
“Get yourself educated, son,” he told Lyle. “I don't mean a degree, I mean
learning
. You're gonna be dealing with all sorts of people from all walks of life with many different levels of education. You want to be a success in this you've got to have a wide range of knowledge on a lot of subjects. You don't need to be an expert in any of them, but you need a nodding acquaintance.”
Lyle took that advice, sneaking into classrooms and auditing courses at U of M, Wayne State, and the University of Detroit Mercy, everything from philosophy to economics to western literature. That was where he began scouring the street from his speech. Didn't earn a single credit, but a whole world had opened up to him, a world he took with him when he and Charlie left Ann Arbor for Dearborn to strike out on their own.
There Lyle set himself up in a storefront as a psychic advisor. They worked their asses off to perfect their techniques.
The money was good, but Lyle knew he could do better. So they moved on.
And landed here, in an upper corner of Queens, New York.
Do it before you're thirty, they said. Well, Lyle had turned thirty last month, and he'd done it.
And now, sitting in the first real estate he'd ever owned, Lyle Kenton slipped his hands forward along the polished oak surface of the table, allowing the ends of the metal bars strapped to his forearms within the sleeves of his coat to slip under the edge of the tabletop. He raised those forearms and his end of the table followed.
“There it goes!” Evelyn whispered as the table tipped toward her. “The spirits are here!”
Lyle eased back on his arms and worked one of the levers Charlie had built into the legs of the pawfoot table to raise its far side, right under Vincent McCarthy's hands. Lyle peeked and saw McCarthy's eyebrows arch, but he gave no sign that he was overly impressed.
“Whoops!” Anya giggled as her chair tilted in response to an electronic signal from Charlie's command post. “There it goes again! Happens every time!”
Then Evelyn's tilted, then McCarthy's. This time he looked perplexed. Table tipping he might be able to write off, but his chair … ?
Time to make him a believer.
“Something is coming through,” Lyle said, squeezing his eyes shut. “I believe it concerns our new guest. Yes, you, Vincent. The spirits detect turmoil within you. They sense you are concerned about something.”
“Aren't we all?” McCarthy said.
Lyle kept his eyes closed but he could hear the smirk. Vincent wanted to believe—that was why he was here—but he felt a little silly too. He was nobody's fool and wasn't about to let anyone pull a fast one on him.
“But this is a deep concern, Vincent, and not about anything so crass as money.” Lyle opened his eyes. He needed
to start picking up on the nonverbal cues. “This wrenches at your heart, doesn't it.”
McCarthy blinked but said nothing. He didn't have to; his expression spoke volumes.
“I sense a great deal of confusion along with this concern.”
Again, he nodded. But Lyle had expected that. If McCarthy wasn't confused, he wouldn't be here.
Lyle half-closed his eyes and pressed his fingers to his temples, assuming his Deep Concentration pose. “I sense someone from the Other Side trying to contact you. Your mother perhaps? Is she still alive?”
“Yes. She's not well, but she's still with us.”
That could be it. But now to salvage the remark about the mother.
“Then why do I have this sense of a definite maternal presence? Very loving. A grandmother, perhaps? Have your grandmothers crossed over?”
“Yes. Both.”
“Ah, perhaps that's who it is then. One of your grandmothers … although I'm not sure which side yet. But it will come, it will come … it's getting clearer …”

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