The Haunting of James Hastings (33 page)

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Authors: Christopher Ransom

Tags: #Fiction, #Action & Adventure, #Suspense

BOOK: The Haunting of James Hastings
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I found the bathroom door, pushed it open, and arrived in a child’s bedroom.
 
I stepped back into the hall and looked at the other doors. The upstairs hall had half a dozen of these generic faux-oak doors and they all looked alike, but this was the one that had been locked. Arthur’s room. The Bluebeard room. Someone had been in here recently.
 
I glanced around and my eyes locked on a framed photo on top of the dresser. I went to it, holding up the 5 x 7. It was of Annette, younger, radiant, with redder hair. She was posed on a deck with the desert in the background. She looked beautiful and happy. Could have been two years ago or as many as seven. There was another photo on the dresser, fallen on its face. It was not in a frame, just a little wallet-size that had been propped against a wooden music box shaped like a sea turtle. I turned it over.
 
The boy was maybe eight or nine, with a crop of brown hair. He wore a white dress shirt and tie under a blue blazer with a private school crest. There had been an attempt at a smile, but his mouth still hung open in a sagging oval. There was a forced happiness about him, the kind that emotionally neglected children try so hard but ultimately fail to conceal. I flipped the photo over, returning to the tiny, blue ink scrawl at the bottom.
 
 
Aaron, Grade 5
 
 
He was the boy I had seen standing in my backyard just weeks ago. The boy in the black sweatshirt who had been in the empty house two nights ago, then followed me just hours ago.
 
Annette. Arthur. Aaron. A family of As.
 
The wife was sleeping down the hall. The husband was dead of suicide. What had happened to the son?
 
31
 
It was your average suburban boy’s bedroom, but one that, at first glance, did not contain much in the way of personality fingerprints. I was not a homicide detective. The thousand ways in which this boy Aaron was unique were lost on me.
 
There was a poster of Big Ben Roethlisberger in a drop-back, arm cocked and ready to throw the pigskin to Neptune. A double bed with plain green cotton sheets and a thin peppermint-striped spread. Soccer cleats and mall clothes in his closet. Lots of toys, but I doubted they were much different from the toys of any single child born to parents with money. A science kit. A remote-controlled airplane and a space station thing hanging from the ceiling. Three dusty Track & Field Day ribbons from third grade tacked to a cork board. Plastic robots and manga books. Everything neatly displayed on shelves, waiting, preserved, nothing boxed up or stowed away. It was as if he had merely gone to bed a few nights ago and vanished before waking up.
 
What makes you so sure he’s dead? That boy in the house and on the street was pretty lively. He gave you a handful of marbles, too. Maybe Aaron just ran away.
 
Yes, but his face . . .
 
A game system was tucked into a narrow entertainment center with a door of tinted black glass. Above it, an Onkyo rack with CD and DVD units wired up to a small, collapsible flat-screen monitor. On his desk was a Mac mini. Nice stuff, but I wasn’t going to search his computer files, not now, not with Annette just down the hall. I needed something that spoke to him, about him. Most boys don’t keep diaries, do they? I didn’t find one in his desk, but I did find something else that seemed a bit of a coincidence. In the desk’s shallow center drawer there was a single scrap of white notebook paper with numbers written on it.
 
 
22 38 44 06
 
 
 
And above that, written in the same stiff, pencil scrawl -
 
 
Middle combination
 
 
 
I kept the combination to Stacey’s storage locker in my desk’s center drawer, too. This must have been Aaron’s locker combination from school. The numbers seemed excessive, though, and oddly familiar. Four of them instead of the usual three. I tried to distinguish a pattern to them. 22 38 44 06. What did they have in common? Anything? I looked up at his wall and thought for a moment, mumbling. 22 38 44 . . . I knew these numbers, could almost hear them. And then I could hear them, they came to me in a marching rhythm, a track with heavy base, a slow tempo, and a Bone Thugs set of harmonizing back-up vocals.
 
The 22 is for you
Cause I love my guns
The 38 is for hate
Treat ’em like my sons
The 44 is for whores
Cause I love my guns
The aught-six is for the pigs
Who sent my brother to the pen
Cause he loved his guns
The AK is for the State
Can you feel the white hate?
Motherfuckuhs grab yo guns
The Revolution’s rising sun
They make me feel like a man
Join the Revolution, son
 
 
It was another Ghost song, ‘From My Cold Dead Hands’. The numbers were guns. Gun calibers. A coincidence? They didn’t mean anything to me except for the fact that I remembered the song, and I doubted a kid would choose gun calibers for a locker combination. You didn’t get to choose your locker combo when I was a kid. You bought the stupid lock from the drugstore and it came with pre-set numbers. I was closing the drawer when my eyes caught on something white and glossy - another photo. I turned it over.
 
A Christmas tree with bundles of torn wrapping paper. Aaron, younger, sitting on the floor in a pair of footie pajamas. Next to him, a large stuffed bear, the Kenneth bear, its eyes red from the camera flash.
 
The bear. She lied. Annette left Aaron’s bear in my house. When? Why? What was she trying to tell me? And what if she didn’t lie, but wasn’t even aware of what she had done?
 
I put the photo back and closed the drawer.
 
Next to the entertainment center, on the floor and so innocuous I hadn’t noticed it on my first pass, was a blue footlocker with leather handles. I had a green one just like it when I was a kid, filled with plastic Army men and Micronauts. Aaron’s was latched, but I popped the brass flap open with a ballpoint pen I found in his desk drawer. Inside was Aaron’s music collection. As I ran my fingers over the spines of the jewel cases, I became dizzy.
 
Ninety per cent of his collection consisted of releases from one artist.
 
The bad one.
 
I crouched over Aaron’s footlocker, opened the copy of Ghost’s first
Rolling Stone
cover, and found the review that introduced the monster to the world.
 
Parents, teachers and brain-dead celebs be warned - you’re about to be bombed. Ghost, a white rapper cold as ice and anything but vanilla, has delivered a masterpiece in what is sure to become a hip-hop landmark of self-evisceration. Over the course of sixteen diabolical tracks produced by his mentor, PhD-Jay,
Autotopsy
combines terrifyingly nimble wordplay, no less than three personalities (alternately homicidal, comedic, tortured), and emcee-slaying splatter-crunk in genius and despicable ways. It may be the first rap album crafted equally for a generation of ADD tweens, Ivy League brats, desperate housewives and anyone else who prefers their audible pharmaceuticals, gonzo porn plots and Tarantino exploding heads served up on a bloodstained scratch-table smorgasbord of knives, ski masks, witches and farmhouse nightmares . . .
 
 
The review went on for another half-page. They gave it five stars. But, then, they gave all of Ghost’s records five stars, except for
Snuffed
, the last one, which everyone knew was a tremendous hunk of shit and which even Ghost had started referring to as his
Godfather III
. There were dozens more such rags in the footlocker, the ones that had given my former employer top billing.
 
It didn’t stop there. Little Aaron, at the ripe old age of eight (nine? ten?) had not been just another Ghost fan. He had the entire catalog. All five studio albums, the soundtrack to Ghost’s movie,
Haunted Tracks
, the singles, even the imports. He also had the collectible Playa Cards and a pair of Ghost’s signature Converse (size 5, never laced), a pint-sized white
Vaporware
tracksuit, as well as half a dozen concert tees, and - shrink-wrapped and autographed in green marker - a replica of the skull and bones wristband Ghost wore on stage to keep the sweat from shorting his mic. I could vouch for the signature. I’d seen it a thousand times and signed it a couple hundred more during those encounters when I was trapped into providing an autograph instead of just fleeing as the cameras began to click.
 
It was real, this was real.
 
The black hooded sweatshirt. The white letters across the chest spelled Ghost. The limited edition ones he had sold through his website. Of course, that’s why I had almost recognized it.
 
Perhaps Aaron had died in it.
 
Or was this all a coincidence? I needed it to be. Ghost had millions of fans, after all. This footlocker did not mean there was a sinister connection between Aaron’s world and mine, between Annette and me.
 
Even so, the guilt over Stacey that had reawakened during my encounter with Annette this morning now combined with Aaron’s whispering -
look what they did, look what they did
- and this entire Ghost mess, and I knew it was all connected somehow, and that I was at the center of it, responsible for something worse than I ever imagined. The undefined guilt hung over me like a steel-spiked albatross, leaving me to dig for an explanation that would justify all I had dedicated to this man, this rapper who had become my alter ego and would not leave me alone, and I found myself sinking deeper into myself and defending him as if both of us were to blame.
 
The kid. Had Arthur and Annette condoned this? They must have known what their son was listening to. Had they caved in to incessant ‘but all the others kids have it’ whining? Or were they the kind of cool parents who understood that rap music, no matter how much it glorified violence and pornified women, was fiction and sometimes art? Did they accept that Ghost was a personality, an identity construct created out of a poor but fiercely intelligent trailer kid’s imagination as a response to his nightmare childhood? Did they understand that the content of his music came from his environment and inspirations, his first means of escape: earlier rap music, horror films, his father’s gun collection, his mother’s medicine cabinet? Or was it simpler than all that justification? Maybe Annette was one of those moms who couldn’t decipher the lyrics that rivaled De Sade’s, the kind that hears only the catchy beats and rhyming sounds, and remained ignorant of what her son was giggling about from behind his bedroom door, from inside his iPod cocoon.
 
She and Arthur might have liked his music, I realized (which necessitated that she had also lied to me about not liking his music). The hate letters came from fundamentalists and censorship warriors: no surprise there. But Ghost’s fan mail also came from Japanese schoolgirls, suburban American boys and girls of all colors and, yes, parents. Adults. Educated, cultured people. More than I would have imagined.
 
It wasn’t just his music, which always had a pop hook to go along with the meat cleaver. There was something All-American appealing about Ghost’s serrated honesty and charisma, his success story, the rise from poverty to empire, his very suburban appearance (read: white, clean-cut). He wasn’t the Oakland Raider-clad, corn-rowed gangsta that had scared the shit out of the establishment in the eighties. He was just this guy with a knack for looking victimized, small enough you wanted to take him under your arm and explain it to him that it couldn’t be all that bad.
 
They loved him because he tore himself apart for their listening pleasure. His demons and sins were their entertainment. Very few popular artists are capable, let alone willing, to open themselves to such an extent. But Ghost didn’t know how to do it any other way. It was his calling card and philosophy. Music would heal him, but only after he had used it to destroy himself in front of the audience. It was right there in the title of his first album.
Autotopsy
, and he meant it.
 
But even Ghost fictionalized his self-image, exaggerated his wicked deeds. Of course he did. Otherwise he would be in jail by now. He could rap about making love to a headless woman - while her severed head used the voice of his mother to make fun of him from atop the dresser across the room - because it was too outrageous to take seriously. And the critics offered cover aplenty. Because he was literate, took poetry to another level. He had street cred because he flowed with exceptional ease and was his own worst critic. He used words the way Bobby Fischer used pawns and bishops, mixing slang and gutter talk with five syllable wowzers like some love child of Michael Chabon and Bushwick Bill. A guy who could cross-pollinate references to John Wayne Gacy with text excerpts from Pinske’s translation of
The Inferno
couldn’t really be a psycho in real life, could he?

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