Burial (17 page)

Christ on a bicycle, I thought, this guy could use a violin.

‘I thought you said this spirit was
different,
' I interrupted him.

I hoped Michael Greenberg wouldn't misinterpret the
sharpness in my voice as meaning that I didn't have very much faith in Martin's talents. The only reason I was being sharp was because I had heard all of this salespitch about ‘Hope, and happiness, and relief from suffering' so many times before — mainly from me.

Quite honestly, as far as I was concerned, Martin didn't need to sell himself. He had more spiritual skill than anybody I had ever met, Amelia included. I had seen him raise the face of my late Indian compadre Singing Rock out of a book about Spanish painting. I had seen it, touched it, heard it talk, and that was good enough for me.

Martin said, ‘By now, I would have expected to hear the spirits talking — even
calling
. But all I can sense so far is —' he half-closed his eyes, as if he were trying to hear the strains of a very distant train-whistle — ‘
darkness
.'

‘Darkness?' asked Michael.

Martin hesitated. ‘Darkness, yes. Extraordinary darkness. And the movements of those who live in darkness. The movements of those who
are
darkness.'

Karen squeezed my arm. ‘This won't be too dangerous, will it?'

‘Oh, no, not especially,' Martin reassured her. ‘Not unless you happen to be afraid of the dark. Not unless your own shadow makes you jump.' He gave a brittle little laugh. ‘I'm not talking about the Prince of Darkness.'

‘You'd better be introduced to Naomi,' I told him. ‘The sooner we can find out what's wrong with her, the sooner this gentleman can get back to leading some kind of normal life.'

‘Of course,' agreed Martin, rubbing his hands together with supreme confidence.

Michael opened the dining room door and took two or three paces back, leaving it open.

‘In here?' asked Martin, and stepped cautiously forward.

If anything, the dining room was even gloomier and colder
than it had been before, and it certainly smelled sourer. The furniture was still piled up against the opposite wall, and Naomi still stubbornly clung to her single dining room chair. She was wrapped in a dark plaid blanket Her hair was wild and she was beginning to look emaciated. Her eyes were red—rimmed with exhaustion and stress. To be truthful, she stank.

Martin crossed the room and hunkered down to Naomi's eye-level. At first her eyes were rolled up white in her head, but Martin patiently waited for her, his hands clasped together, and after a while her eyelids began to flutter and her pupils reappeared. She focused on Martin in perplexity; and then she glanced over at me.

‘Hallo, Naomi,' said Martin, touching her blanketed knee, as if she were an old friend whom he hadn't seen for years and years. ‘How are you feeling?'

‘I feel —
worried,
' said Naomi, hoarsely.

‘Worried?' asked Martin. ‘What have you got to be worried about?'

Michael said, ‘She talks to him, she talks to you, why won't she talk to me?'

‘Ssh,' said Karen; and I said, ‘Ssh.'

Naomi said, in the tone of an irritable little girl, ‘I'm worried about what's going to happen when …'

Martin said nothing, but waited for her to search for the words.

‘I'm worried about what's going to happen when I die.'

‘Why are you so concerned about that?'

Naomi glanced quickly from side to side, as if she were trying to make sure that nobody else was listening. ‘Supposing I die in the night and fall off this chair?'

Martin thought about that. ‘All right,' he said at last, ‘supposing you do?'

‘Then they'll get everything, won't they? Then they'll have shown us how strong they are.'

‘Who's “they”, Naomi?'

Naomi jerked her head towards the wall.

The people next door?' Martin asked her.

Naomi shook her head. ‘
He
knows,' she said, jerking her head toward me. ‘And
she
knows,' jerking her head toward Karen. She looked like a pecking barnyard chicken.

‘Mr Erskine knows who it is?' Martin pressed her. ‘
And
Ms Tandy?'

Naomi covered her face with her hand, so that only her eyes looked out. Martin stared at her in fascination; but there was no doubt that he was disturbed too.

‘Now I'm beginning to understand what your friend Singing Rock was trying to warn you about,' he said.

‘You've seen that sign before?' I asked him. ‘You know what it means?'

He stood up, touching Naomi on the shoulder to indicate that he appreciated her help. ‘It can signify several different things. It has a meaning in clinical psychiatry as well as folklore and spiritualism.'

Michael put in, ‘Her analyst thinks that it's an indication that she's developing a split personality. A form of mild schizophrenia.'

‘Well, he's quite correct,' Martin agreed. ‘Psychiatric patients who cover their faces or who make improvized masks are often trying to indicate that they're “someone else.”'

‘And you think this is Naomi's problem?' asked Michael.

Martin gave him a wry smile. ‘Let's be honest about this. Naomi is exhibiting several tell-tale symptoms of schizophrenia. A progressive withdrawal from the real world. Hallucinations, in the form of threatening voices and images. A tendency to remain rigidly in the same place. I can understand why her analyst thinks that she could be schizophrenic.'

‘But?' asked Michael.

‘But look around you,' smiled Martin. ‘How does her
analyst explain this furniture? How does he explain these pictures?' He tried to straighten one of the pictures so that it hung downwards, instead of sideways, but as soon as he let it go, it swung back up to a horizontal position. ‘There is so much paranormal activity in this room, it makes Amityville look like
The Wonder Years
. And it's so
tenacious
. I never saw such tenacious activity before. Usually, a mischievous spirit grows tired of the game after a while and goes off to make mischief someplace else. But this spirit is
determined
This spirit is like a pit bull that won't take its teeth out of your leg, even if you break its back.

He said to Michael, ‘Have Naomi's doctors offered any kind of explanation for any of this?'

Michael shook his head. ‘Dr Stein seems to think that she's doing it herself — I don't know — out of spite, or menopausal derangement. He won't say
how
. I never saw a change of life that could make a thousand-pound sideboard move across the room. He keeps talking mumbo—jumbo about psycho-kinetic influences and mind-over-matter. I don't know whether he really believes in it; but he hasn't offered any other suggestions. Dr Bradley prefers to ignore it.'

Martin looked around the dim, rancid room, his breath fuming from the chill. ‘He prefers to
ignore
it? How can he ignore it?'

I made one more attempt to straighten up one of the paintings. It stayed vertical for a moment or two, then dragged itself back to the horizontal.

I said, as lightly as I could, ‘I guess he ignores it the same way that you and I ignore muggers and junkies and guys sleeping in cardboard boxes. That's what you call self-absolution, isn't it? If you ignore it, you don't have to worry about it. Doctors are good at that kind of thing.'

Martin touched the walls, touched the furniture. ‘Well …' he said, ‘whatever your Dr Bradley believes, there's something
here. We'd better start trying to find out what it is.'

‘How are you going to do that?' asked Michael.

‘I'm going to communicate with it.'

‘You're going to get in touch with it?' I asked him. ‘You're going to hold a seance?'

Karen looked anxious. The last time that she and I had been involved in a seance, she had come face to face with the spirit who — eventually — had almost killed her.

‘Harry …' she said. ‘Not for me, please.'

‘Don't worry,' Martin told her. ‘I'm not holding a seance in the conventional sense — you know, everybody holding hands, knock-knock, is there anybody there? They're not very effective, in any case, seances like that. The more people you get involved, the more psychic resistance you build up. If you want a really clear message, then it has to be one-to-one.'

‘Can I help?' I asked him.

Martin glanced around the room, his eyes quick and analytical, searching for anything amiss, his hand pressed thoughtfully over his mouth. ‘Yes, you can. I'll be going into a transplanar trance. There's a possibility that I may have to go in pretty deep to locate the spirit that's responsible for this. It's being very unresponsive and it may be hiding in a very complicated way — taking on the shape of another spirit, for example, or dispersing its mind through several levels.

‘In spite of your self-deprecation, Harry, you
do
have quite impressive sensitivity. I want you to be my anchorman; the guy who belays me.'

‘What does that mean?'

‘It means that if you sense that anything is going badly wrong, you should bring me back. No questions, no arguments — no matter what I appear to be saying to you, you should bring me back.'

‘How am I supposed to know if anything's going badly wrong?'

‘You'll
know
, believe me.'

‘And what do I do to bring you back?'

‘You simply shake me and wake me.'

I puffed out my cheeks. ‘I sure hope you know what you're doing.'

Martin smiled. ‘That's what I enjoy about being a psychic sensitive, Harry. It's different every time. You
never
know what you're doing.'

He took off his coat, and nonchalantly dropped it. Instead of falling on the floor, it dropped sideways and draped itself over one of the legs of the Greenbergs' dining-table. I was impressed by that. That was what I called style. That was like Norman Schwarzkopf using a blazing Kuwaiti oil-well to light a cigar.

He unfastened his silver cuff-links and rolled up his shirt-sleeves. ‘There's one thing I think I need to clear up before I start. Naomi here said that you and Ms Tandy both
knew
. What exactly did she mean by that?'

I looked across at Karen, but Karen turned her face away.

I said, with some reluctance, ‘Karen and I were both involved in a serious psychic disturbance once, that's all.'

‘How long ago was that?'

‘Twenty years. A little more.'

‘Was it anywhere near here?'

‘Unh-hunh. It was up at the Sisters of Jerusalem Hospital, on Park Avenue.'

‘Do you think it could be in any way connected to what's happening here? Even remotely?'

‘How could it? Who knows? The spirits move in mysterious ways, you should know that.'

‘Oh, come on, Harry. How often does your average man in the street get himself involved in a serious psychic disturbance? Once in a lifetime? You're more likely to meet the Pope in the Chock Full O' Nuts.'

‘You want my honest opinion?' I retorted. ‘I've been racking my brains, but I can't see how
this
psychic disturbance could possibly be connected to
my
psychic disturbance. I accept that Singing Rock was trying to warn me about something, but I don't see how or why he could be warning me about
this
.'

Martin lifted both hands in apology. ‘I'm sorry. I didn't mean to upset you.'

‘You didn't,' I told him, cooling down. ‘It's just that — well, it was pretty damn harrowing, that's all. It took me a long time to get over it. Maybe I should have had therapy. Karen went through years of it. She doesn't like to talk about it, even now. So you can see why we don't take very kindly to the suggestion that we might have to go through it all over again.'

‘All right,' Martin conceded. ‘But if there
is
a connection, I want you to understand ahead of time that we're going to find out about it very quickly indeed. In fact, it's essential that we find out about it very quickly indeed. So it's better that you're prepared for it The more I know, the quicker I can locate this spirit The more I know, the
stronger
I can be.'

I couldn't take my eyes away from Karen. One hand half-covered her eyes and the other hand was pressed against the back of her neck. I went over to her and said, quietly, ‘It's going to be okay. I guarantee it.'

‘Just like you guaranteed you could help Naomi?' Michael put in.

I tried to control my temper. ‘I'm doing my best,
capiche
? Martin's the very best there is.'

Martin said to Michael, ‘If you don't object, Mr Greenberg, I would find it easier to cope with this disturbance if you and Ms Tandy were to leave the room. You are obviously feeling tired and hostile — no fault of your own. Ms Tandy is obviously feeling afraid. Neither of those feelings
is very conducive to safe transplanar trancing.'

‘What about Naomi?' asked Michael.

‘She'll be fine. I'll take good care of Naomi, believe me. That's what I'm here for.'

‘All right,' Michael agreed. ‘Is there anything you need?'

‘Yes, please,' said Martin. ‘A bowl of water. An ordinary kitchen mixing-bowl would do.'

Michael went to fetch the water. He handed it carefully to Martin, and Martin set it down on the floor. To my surprise, it stayed where it was.

‘Spirits have no influence whatsoever over water,' Martin told me. ‘I'm surprised you didn't know that.'

‘What about the bowl?'

‘They can't move the bowl because the bowl is holding the water. There's a very interesting chapter on spirits and water in
Daneman's Psychic Phenomena
.'