Authors: Thomas Cater
George nodded. “It will be dark when we get there; it’s
darker there than it is in town. There are no lights in the house and the trees
refuse to admit moonlight.”
“I know,” I said, “I’ve been there. I know it gets
dark sooner out there then it does anywhere else.”
“When the sun goes down, it becomes a very dangerous
place,” George said.
“I know, George, I know.”
“We’ll need more than just the two of us.”
“I’ll call Virgil. He’ll give us a hand.”
“Why call him? We have enough here to conduct a
séance.”
“You mean with these people; your friends?”
“Why Not? Their minds are pliable. Besides, they get
so few opportunities to interact. It will be good for them to meet new people.”
“George, are you forgetting? The people we will be
meeting are dead.”
“That’s irrelevant,” he said. “Sooner or later, we’ll
all end up that way.”
I felt apprehensive. “I cannot …will not be
responsible. I can’t ask them to risk their lives. They don’t look responsible
enough to make that kind of decision.”
George turned, walked to the front of the room and
clapped his hands. “Listen up, folks. Mr. Case has a very important assignment
to carry out and he needs our help. Are we going to let him down?”
“No,” the crowd murmured solemnly and without
conviction.
“I can’t hear you,” George said.
“No,” they murmured again.
“Good,” George concluded, while he was still ahead.
“Instead of holding service right here tonight, we are going to a fine old
house in the country. We’ll be driven there by Mr. Case in his beautiful
recreational vehicle, and we will be guests in a house he has just purchased.”
No one really seemed to care, except the Abacases.
They scooped up the last of the Christmas cookies and drained their cups of
kool-aid. Mrs. Abacas buttonholed George by the door.
“I’m sorry; Mr. Thacker, but Clarence and I won’t be
able to join you; we’ve got to stay with the hotel. We haven’t been out of town
in forty years, only to visit ... I can’t remember who. I don’t know what it
would be like to take an evening off. I hope you won’t forget us in your
prayers.”
He clasped her to his bosom and kissed her shiny
forehead.
“You’ve been family to me, Mame; I’ll never forget
you.”
He kissed her goodbye and began directing the small
contingent of people down the hall to the stairs. “Come along, Janie, Mr. Case
is a very busy man. He has many things to do. We don’t want to be responsible
for holding him up now, do we?”
When Janie walked, her entire body revolted. Her legs
marched to the tune of a different drum than did her arms, hips and head. She
looked like a windup toy whose mechanism had gone askew. There was no assurance
that she would make it out of the room much less down the hall and out the building.
Bob walked into the door and walls two or three times,
before he finally made it to the hall.
“I’ll get the van and meet you out front in about five
minutes.”
“Make that ten,” George said. “I’ve never tried to get
them out the front door before.”
I nodded and squeezed back into the elevator.
“Damned Kaiser,” Clarence snarled. “Any man with a
lower lip that touches his friggin’ chin can’t be trusted,” he warned.
“I agree, sir,” I replied.
He gave me a long hard look and then turned to Mame.
“Do we know this young man, mom?”
“Mr. Cash, dear,” she said. He looked again,
carefully evaluating my lips. “Good sermon, preacher,” he said, “but a little
long winded.”
“I’ll work on it,” I replied.
The elevator bounced to a stop and the door took
forever to open. I helped the Abacases through the narrow portal, holding it
open lest it crush them in its steel jaws before they got out. I could see
there was something she wanted to say, but didn’t know where to begin.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Young man,” she said, “I don’t want to tell you what
to do, I’d never do that, but Clarence is not always right about the things he
says. Sometimes he is wrong. Oh, I know he sounds right when he’s talking, but
sometimes he just gets things mixed up.”
“Mrs. Abacas, your husband has been more help to me
than anyone else in this town. The details are not that important, not yet,
anyhow. I just need to know the general direction. If you can find that
registration card and the name of the gypsy stone mason, I will be forever in
your debt.”
She nodded. “I’ll find it. I have been keeping the
records in this hotel for fifty, sixty
…
no, seventy
years. I know where
everything is. I’ll find it.”
I pressed a quick kiss on her forehead. For an elderly
woman, she invited affection. For a moment, I thought she blushed, but that
would have been impossible. Blood could not have circulated that quickly
through those antiquated arteries. The roman aqueducts were probably in better
shape.
“Thank you and goodbye,” I said.
She waved with her free hand while lowering Clarence
into his chair in front of the TV.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
It was a long quiet ride to the Ryder house. I could
see Janie’s cigarette glowing in the darkness through my rear view mirror. Bob
and Eulah had passed out from too much grape kool-aid. I wondered about their
purple dreams. George was smiling deeper and wider than ever. I was growing
more and more apprehensive.
“George,” I said, “I have one question.”
“Okay,” he said, “ask.”
“Why do they call your friend, Bob, the dog?”
“Because he bites,” was his reply.
I nodded.
It was amazing how much darker it was in the country
than in town. I had to turn the interior lights on half way there. By the time
we reached the dirt road, TV lights were glowing in Elanville. I could not have
seen a thing without them.
“What time you got, George?”
He squinted at his oversized LCD with too many
gadgets.
“Half past eight.”
“Night comes early in the mountains,” I said.
“I told you,” he replied prophetically.
“I know you told me, but why? It almost seems
unnatural.”
He nodded slowly. “The days are shorter and the nights
are longer.”
I decided not to encourage his ghoulish outlook. We
sat silently watching dark shadows glide by or leap from tree to tree in
advance of the headlights. I stopped at the gate and left the headlights burning.
I tried to spot the Ryder house amid the darkness beyond the trees, but it was
impossible. I hoped that perhaps just this once, Elinore had left some ‘will of
the wisp’ behind to guide me, but there was nothing but deep, dark impenetrable
night.
“I forgot to get those damned bones from Virgil’s car.
I hope no one steals them,” I said.
“Who would want to steal the skeleton of a whangdoodle?”
George asked.
I took a deep breath, swung out of the seat and into
the back of the van.
“Well, ladies and gentlemen, this is it. This is
home.”
I noticed Bob and Janie were shaking more than usual.
I chalked that up to the cool air coming from the creek and the heavy growth of
trees, and not some paranormal knowledge of events.
Eulah was straining through thick glasses to see anything
at all. I knew she hopelessly blind in the dark. She was -- George had assured
me -- in every sense of the word, ‘blind as a bat’.
We helped them out and lined them up beside each
other. There were three of them and two of us. By ‘we,’ I meant George and I,
the living fearful, as opposed to ‘them,’ Janie, Bob and Eulah, the walking
unconscious, or those who needed help to fall down a flight of stairs.
“I feel like a Judas goat,” I told George as I
unpacked a flashlight and a kerosene camping lamp from the van.
He smiled, almost laughed. “Don’t worry about them,”
he said. “They are God’s children. He’s not going to let anything happen to
them before their time.”
“No, but what happens if this is their time?” I
replied.
He grabbed Eulah and Bob by their arms and led them to
the wall. “Sorry folks,” he said, hoisting them over one by one. “We’ve got to
climb the wall tonight. Mr. Case doesn’t have keys to the gate.”
I carried the lamp, took Janie’s hand and coaxed her
along beside me. She dragged her feet, walking around each fallen branch, each
bent weed, taking the long circuitous route around every obstacle. I was
delighted beyond reason when we finally reached the house without incurring any
major catastrophes. My eyes had grown relatively accustomed to the surrounding
darkness by then, but that only made the house appear far more frightening than
it was during the day.
I began to suspect the supernatural only held terror
for special types, persons capable of over-imagining everything that could
possibly happen. Janie, Bob and Eulah had an extremely sobering effect on me. I
could almost believe they were incapable of imagining anything,
especially
conjuring
up or disturbing restless spirits, and they were therefore incapable of
experiencing any fear.
At the foot of the steps, I released Janie’s hand. Her
arm remained extended, as if I had never released it. “We’re going into the
house now, folks,” I said, and my voice broke on the last word.
“What house?” I heard Bob say as he circled for the
third time. Eulah was looking in every direction, up and down and all around.
“George, are you ready?”
“Lead on, McDuff!” he said, with disturbing alacrity.
It was amusing to see George change from one person to
another. He was a man of various and distinct personalities, almost a multiple
personality, and a man with an ominous sense of humor. I took the lead in that
doomed column.
The front door was still open and ajar, but the
temperature inside the house was uncannily warm. In fact, it felt as if someone
had turned the furnace on to ‘bake’ or ‘barbecue’. The décor was still falling
apart at the seams, but the house proper was solidly intact. I set the lamp on
a table. There was fuel in it, but I did not know how much, or how old. I
turned up the wick. Within seconds, the lamp was glowing brightly, casting
tall, dark shadows all around the room. Janie, Bob and Eulah were calling for
still more light. I elevated the lamp and turned the wick up enough to brighten
the entire room. They were attracted to light like insects.
I set the lamp on a table in the center of the room
while George led his wards to nearby chairs. I searched the other rooms across
the hall for more kerosene lamps. I found two and brought them to the sitting
room. George was arranging wooden chairs around a mahogany table. He had
removed the dusty pictures and stacked them on a couch. I lit the lamps and
placed them on the tables. With three lamps glowing brightly and casting light
into the hall, I felt as snug as a bug in a rug.
George was coaching and advising his command. “I want
you to sit at the table, hold hands and concentrate on my words. If I tell you
to think hard about something, I want to see you sweating. At all times, you
will continue to hold onto the hand of the person sitting next to you. Remember,
don’t do or say anything until I tell you to speak; then you can speak. Is that
understood?”
They made indistinct sounds that implied they
understood, but no one said so aloud. I put a lamp on the fireplace mantle and
left one on the table. I found a seat between Bob and Eulah and took their
hands in my own. George sat between Janie and Eulah. He was almost straight across
the table from me. We turned the lamp down a wee bit, just to soften the light
and give us something to focus our attention on. George lifted his eyes up to
the darkened ceiling and said, “All right, let’s concentrate.” I was of a mind
to ask ‘on what?’ when he said, “the light; concentrate on the light.”
I tried to look into the heart of the flame, if a
flame had a heart. I tried to find the white-hot center and in effect, practice
a form of self-hypnosis, but I had never been very successful at it. Still,
this environment lent something to the power of suggestion. I was succeeding in
something, though I dare say I didn't notice a thing. The room was growing
silent and still, sometimes literally vanishing from my half-closed eyelids,
but then I would call it back into being, almost afraid to let it go. The flame
was taking up more and more of my undivided attention and George’s words were
beginning to sink down to an unfathomed depth inside me.
I felt as if I was falling asleep when Janie’s fingers
began to twitch. I squeezed them a little tighter to make her stop. It was
becoming a distraction. A few seconds later, she began to twitch again. My
concentration was beginning to suffer. I figured it was time to intimidate her
with a threatening look.
I turned my face slowly to meet hers, but Janie was
no longer sitting beside me. There was, however, something strange occupying
her space. It was a creature with extraordinary features. Its eyes glowed
orange as tiger lilies. Whether or not she was smiling, I could not say, but
there was a display of razor sharp teeth protruding from her mouth, or its
mouth, and they were as sharp as any animal’s teeth had a right to be. In those
glowing orange eyes, I could see no semblance of human emotion. Mesmerized by
its gruesome smile, I felt the blood I once mistook for courage in my veins
turn to ice water, so I uncorked a terrifying gasp.