Authors: Thomas Cater
Mrs. Abacas was sitting at the front desk. The
Hapsburg hater had apparently gone to bed. The TV was off and the lobby was
silent and empty. Mame was going through a cardboard box filled with smaller
boxes that comprised her card catalog. It was dusty and battered enough to come
from the basement. I went straight toward the desk and left the problem of transportation
of the others to George.
“Did you find it?” I asked hopefully.
She showed me the markings on the boxes. The one she
was looking through was dated 1922. There must have been several thousand cards
neatly filed in each box.
“I started in December and I’m working my way back
through time,” she said. “It is easier than starting in January,” she said.
I did not understand the logic, but replied, “And more
scenic.”
She ignored me and continued thumbing through the
cards. I stepped behind the counter to observe her progress. It was remarkable.
The cards were in perfect order, day by day, and the handwriting was impeccably
clear. Thank God for conscientious room clerks, I thought.
“Here we are,” she said, “August.”
She read each card carefully, holding it in her hand
for a moment, as if she were trying to recall the moment she wrote it, and then
flipped it over.
“Karl Miller, Harold Estep, Samuel Long, Morgan
Smith,” she held one card in her hand a little longer than the other, fingering
it, lifting it up to the light, examining it far more carefully. “Yes, this is
it, this is the man,” she said.
She gave me the card. I could barely control the
tremors. I was shaking worse than Janie. I read the name aloud. “Nicodemus
Thanatos.”
The only address on the card was…Washington D.C. The
handwriting on all the cards looked the same. “Did you write all the
registration cards?” I asked.
She nodded proudly. “I got in the habit of doing it.
So many people couldn’t write or spell. I was embarrassed to ask them, so I
filled the cards out myself.”
I held the card in my hand trying to feel if anything
of Nicodemus’s presence had remained after…what was the date? I read the card
again. Aug 24, 1919.
“Can I keep this?” I asked.
Mrs. Abacas looked as if her entire filing system and
the hotel was about to collapse.
“Oh, I don’t know…I’ve never allowed anyone to remove
a card from the hotel.”
“Just long enough to make a copy?” I pleaded.
She was shaking by my request: anxious, flushed
cheeks, heart palpitations and the works. I thought she was going to have a
stroke.
“Never mind,” I said. “I think I’ve got it all. You
can put it back in the file.”
She stopped trembling, snatched the card from my hand
and put it exactly where it belonged.
“Will you need anything else, Mr. Chase?” she asked.
I was glad to see that she had regained control. “No
thank you, Mrs. Abacas, that’s all for now, but I might want to talk to Clarence
again, if it’s all right with you?”
The color returned to her cheeks and she smiled. “You
can find him in front of the TV every day from ten am to 10 pm, and later if there
is a football game on.”
I wanted to thank George and his congregation for
their assistance, but they had all vanished to their respective rooms. I wanted
to visit George in his room, but I figured it would be awhile before he got
them settled down. I was developing a curious respect for him. He would have
made an excellent top sergeant in the Salvation Army. I knew how hard it was to
make rank in that most intriguing of forces, the mercenaries in the battle for
control of man’s soul. Perhaps that is what Vandalia needed: a Salvation Army
outpost, the new frontier perhaps in the deserted wasteland of the human
psyche.
I returned to the van and decided to leave it on the
street for the night, give its wounds time to heal. Metering stopped after 6 pm.
Providing a man didn’t abuse the law, ticketing seemed to be a lost art.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
In the van, I thumbed through Elinore’s notebooks,
always hopeful that something new would catch my eye. Information always
aroused new and different questions. I knew now the land was some kind of
holding tank for lost souls, but didn’t know why and couldn't explain it. Something
was trying to tell me why spirits had fallen victim to the house and land, and their
liberation lay in understanding what Elinore had endured.
There were moments of high productivity when she wrote
5-10 pages at a time, and barren periods when she wrote nothing at all. In
actual days, the notebooks accounted for little more than a few weeks, but
represented years of her life. For more than half of those years, she believed
she possessed supernatural powers.
There were a few notebooks, sketchy in content, but
may have been written while she was in her teens and twenties. I could not help
but believe there were more. Anyone who loved the sound of the inner voice as
much as she did had to write often. It was more than a habit with her. She
wrote to incarnate moments and events in her life she thought she might someday
be able to relive through the eyes of a husband or child.
I kept perusing the pages looking for something
revealing or insightful.
‘
Samuel says that someday soon I will be able to
see more clearly.’
The words went through me like an arrow:
“more
clearly?”
Old Samuel must have kept a spark of hope burning in her youthful
bosom all those years. Maybe he wasn’t such a bad guy after all. Why was she
calling him Samuel? She never called him father, papa, or dad. Who really
understood father-daughter relationships? What made me think he was 'all bad'
anyhow, because he walled spirits up in and around his house? He probably
didn’t know what he was doing. He too might have been a victim by following the
advice of a spiritual counselor. He must have loved her very much to keep that
hope of vision alive.
“He’s sent for a doctor…”
Yes, the words were quite clear. Doctor. Were they
doing eye operations then, corneal transplants? I was ignorant on all points. I
would have to find out. Someone must have known something. Who was the doctor,
Grier? I made a note to check out the names of doctors in town and those
assigned to the hospital.
I flipped rapidly through the pages, my enthusiasm
kindled, looking for the name of a doctor or even a sloppily written Mr., but
the notes trailed off and away into mostly faint and indistinct shadows, ghosts
of their former selves, indiscernible.
I kept skimming, picking up a word here, a sentence
there. In a few places, I found more references to Amy Taylor.
“Amy took me to town on the Fourth of July, everyone
was…”
Was what? Drinking, drunk, dunking drowning, downing,
dawning, damning…It must have been an eventful fourth and I suspect she stayed
out late because…
“The night air was warm and soft during the ride
home.”
I felt like writing Elinore a letter. What could I say?
“Dear Elinore; I hope some good times and a little
happiness found their way into your life. I hope that Amy could see that you
were ready for it, and in just as great a need as anyone else.”
I knew my commiseration wasn’t going to make the
slightest difference. She had probably died a maiden at the ripe old age of 70,
or thereabouts. I made a note in my chronological table: “July 4, 1919, two
years after the United States entered the war in Europe. Elinore Ryder attended
a celebration in town. A wonderful time was had by all.”
I wondered what Samuel was working on then? He was
probably fighting a losing battle with politicos and war profiteers, no doubt,
or looking for some way to hang on to his share of the profits. Wrap it up and
hold it tightly in his hands or in his fists, building higher and stronger
walls around his home, walls to keep busybodies out and long dead spirits in?
Was there a profit in that? Had Samuel struck a bargain with the devil? Had he
figured out some way to barter and trade in that most elusive commodity of all,
the human soul?
If one stopped to think about it, a wall was a lot
like a tightly closed fist. It held things and wouldn’t release them. If Satan
held a town in his grip, he could hold it within a wall. How do you get a demon
to loosen his grip when he comes in the form of a wall? Joshua fought the
battle of Jericho…and the walls came a’ tumbling down. How did he do that?
I closed the notebook again and apologized mentally to
Elinore.
“I’m sorry;” I said thoughtlessly. “I just can’t keep
my eyes open any more. Your words are starting to dance all over the pages
again.”
With a little luck, I hoped I might be able to put
more of the puzzle together while I slept. I was a great believer in dreams
serving as unconscious messengers. I have always suspected they were forgotten memories
of a lost and troubled past.
For
several
months, I had nightmares about living in a house that
was slowly falling apart. I was unable to make any but superficial repairs. It
kept coming apart, especially the plumbing and gas fixtures. One night the house
caught fire because of a defective heater in the bedroom. The damage was beyond
repair. In the dream, I told Myra, the Polish poet, that we should get rid of
it, but she said, ‘No, let’s see if we can save it.’ I said it would only rot
from the inside out and it was pointless to hang on, but she insisted. When I awoke,
I suddenly realized the house was our marriage and the bedroom was our
relationship. I knew then that we would eventually separate.
I thought about the skeleton in Virgil’s car. I
wondered if he bothered to store it in a garage or basement. The ring was also
a concern. Why didn't I remember it? Who had the damned thing? We passed it
around for a few minutes. I had it
,
then Virgil had it, then George had it, but who took it,
or did we put it back on the skeleton?
Damn. I yawned and closed my eyes. I needed sleep.
This aimless speculation was leeching the vitamins and minerals from my body. I
was going to need a Gatorade cocktail in the morning just to keep every synapse
in my nervous system from shorting out.
*
I awakened with an erection that made me wish I had
been more attentive to Constance Pennington’s finer qualities. I also felt
lethargic and helpless, as if elemental forces were manipulating me.
I concentrated on the integrity of my erection. It was
the first in a long time. It was inspiring to consider how much physical
longing went into the contemplation of one pretty face. I have never been able
to write sonnets about beautiful women, but I have never taken my good fortune
for granted.
I was also approaching a time in my life when I felt
the need to spend at least twenty minutes in a shower, thoroughly purging all
the cracks and crevices in my aging body. Life among constantly abluting Asians
had modified my views on personal hygiene.
My van’s refuse tanks were full and I knew I had less
than ten gallons of fresh water in reserve. I decided to sponge off in one of
the vacant rooms at the Phoenix Hotel. I would offer to pay the Abacases for
the water and use of a towel.
I locked up the van and entered the hotel. Mrs. Abacas
was polishing antiques. Everything in the lobby was old, complicated and early
American. She also had a roomful of primitive furniture, tree limbs and twisted
vines in the shapes of beds and benches. I was admiring a strange piece that
stood just inside the street entrance. It was the size of a refrigerator with
dozens of small drawers.
“What have we here?” I asked.
She stepped back to admire her work.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” she said. “I think
it’s a notions cabinet, but a very old one. It may have been in a general store
two or three hundred years ago. I’ve been offered a fortune for it, but what
would I do with money? We have nothing to spend it on.”
“Do you ever think of traveling?” I asked.
“Leave Vandalia and the hotel?” she said.
I had no idea my suggestion would sound so
preposterous. It was a charming hotel, plain on the outside, simple on the
inside, clean, but without any discriminating merit, except the antiques. It
was an inexpensive inn and home to at least a dozen castaways.
“Has Mr. Thacker gone out?” I asked.
She tilted her head in a roundabout way and rolled her
eyes toward the ceiling.
“He usually sleeps much later than this. Is he
expecting you?”
“Yes, he’s got something of mine.”
I wasn’t just making conversation, I was sure George
had the ring. I climbed the stairs two at a time, too impatient to wait for the
elevator. The door to his room was closed, which heightened my anxiety. I tried
the doorknob and then proceeded to knock, increasing the volume. George
answered; his voice was awash with sleep.
“Open the door,” I said impatiently. “It’s Charlie Case.”
He was still in his underwear. The room had a peculiar
transient odor about it. It belonged to no one man or woman, but to the ancient
building. It took hundreds of faceless people to create that odor. Lingering in
the immediate forefront of the odor was the fragrance of spiked Kool-aid,
Christmas cookies and burned out brains.