The Haunting of James Hastings (45 page)

Read The Haunting of James Hastings Online

Authors: Christopher Ransom

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

 
He sits up and goes to the phone and opens the phone book she keeps in the drawer in the little stand, the one in which she has penciled all the numbers with her delicate script, like the hand of another woman from another age. Why does she bother when every cellphone comes with an address book?
 
It’s nicer this way.
 
He calls the Marina garden center and asks for her, but they say she is not scheduled today. He calls the art gallery in Culver City and a man reminds him that Stacey hasn’t worked there for almost six months. He calls two of her friends, Rowina first and then Jessica, but they don’t know where she is and he is left with the impression they do not much like him.
 
He sets the phone down and walks into the kitchen. He stands in front of the sink and drinks a glass of water. He is angry with her. She is always running away. She has been depressed and taking too many pills. She is so unhappy. Why hasn’t he paid more attention to her? How did he let it get so bad? He is never around, always working, on the road. But that is no excuse. It’s his fault, he knows. He has been avoiding his own wife.
 
The woman I love, and she needs my help. She can’t do it alone. It is my job to help her. I will make it up to her. Next time I see her, I will hold her close and tell her we’re leaving, we’re going to start over, I quit, it’s time to have a baby.
 
Where is Stacey?
 
Something bad has happened to her. I can feel it in me. I can feel it in the house. It is like a poisoned shroud, a toxic bubble that surrounds the house and all of West Adams. This was always a dangerous neighborhood and we’ve been lucky so far, but now I know. It’s finally happened.
 
He looks across the yard and notices the garage door is open. It looks like a black mouth yawning. Deep inside, a pale white glare stares back. It is her car, he realizes. Her car is still in the garage. She left for work but her car never made it out of the garage. He is filled with a horrible premonition. He doesn’t want to go.
 
He must go.
 
He walks across the backyard and the urge to run is strong, but he won’t give in. For a moment the dizziness comes back and he feels weak, too weak to be on his feet, but he pushes past it. He walks into the garage and stands next to her car. The driver’s side door is open and there is a cup of milky brown liquid sitting in the console’s cup holder. Stacey’s morning coffee. The creamer is floating in clumps. She always liked her iced coffee in the morning. The ice has melted.
 
To his right is the second garage door, also open, and the car’s rear end is poking into the alley just a bit. Stacey must have gotten out to move something, something blocking her path.
 
But why didn’t she come back? Why did she leave her car? Maybe she ran away with another man. Maybe she doesn’t love me any more. Maybe he came to pick her up, to drive her off to a better life. Or maybe she has been kidnapped. Some sick fuck is driving her away in a van, on his way to Utah with her right now.
 
A fragment of an annoying pop song eddies through his head and he hums along, but the lyrics get away from him before he can carry the tune.
 
He walks through the garage and steps into the alley. The sun is low and the sound of the freeway on the other side of the sound wall is a growing hum. He turns and sees an orange couch. The savages have had at it, the cushions are destroyed. Next to the couch is a folded roll of scrap carpet, a dirty brown tortilla. There are weeds stuck to it, and drag marks in the dirt. Someone dragged this carpet in the alley, recently.
 
He follows the drag marks - and the other ones that look like skid marks from a car - back to the weeds where the carpet used to be. The weeds there are flat and bleached white from lack of sun. There are two sets of footprints. The ones made by the person who dragged the carpet - and another set. Clearer, made recently. This newer set is the set that begins at the carpet and walks away . . . into the garage.
 
Those belong to me. Oh, Jesus, those are mine.
 
He walks back to the carpet and rips the carpet away as easily as removing a clean, flat sheet from a bare mattress. In that split second before fear of the unknown becomes the assaultive horror of knowledge, he thinks,
this is where it started today. This is where I woke up.
 
What really happened here?
 
Ghost or James.
 
There is only room for one of us in this vessel.
 
 
And now the rabbits help me see. Stacey’s rabbits help me see.
 
The engine revs and everything lurches into gear. Ghost is turning Stacey around with one arm and holding the gun at them with the hand of the other as the distance closes. The Glock goes off - POP-POP! - and Stacey shrinks into a ball, falling from his embrace. The windshield is cracked as two holes appear in it and Ghost screams and a third shot POPS and Annette screams and the collision is astounding. Stacey is just a dull sound and James -
James, not Ghost, me
- I jump forward, leaping head-first as if I am going to fly over the car like Superman, but I’m not Superman, my head bounces off the top of the windshield and I rock to a halt, then fold over the hood before flying off it and disappearing under the front of the car.
 
I see.
 
When the light returns, the camera is held steady, aimed at the ground of alley gravel and oil-stained dirt. Everything is quiet. It pans slowly. I am lying on my back - not Ghost, James. I am bleeding from my ears and mouth and nose. My chest is not rising or falling . . .
 
. . . not at first glance. But even as I continue to watch, it is almost imperceptible, the shallowest swell of the ribs, but it is real. It was there in the video, I just didn’t see it, and neither did they . . .
 
I am still breathing. My eyes are blank, unblinking, looking up toward the sky, and one of them is filled with red, a pool of blood in and around the eyeball. A large black ant crawls over my chin and down my neck.
 
‘Do you see that?’ Annette says. Her voice is dull, heavy, sexual.
 
No one answers her.
 
‘Look who’s a Ghost now.’
 
I see.
 
Stacey crying on the side of the road, crying over the dead rabbit. Trying to reach me, using my memories to show me.
 
He’s not dead! He’s not dead!
 
I see.
 
The man in the video, lying in the alley. Annette says, ‘Look who’s a Ghost now.’
 
But I’m not a ghost now. I should be, but I’m not.
 
I dove head-first into a speeding car. My head aches. It was my head. All this time it was not just in my head but
literally my head
. They put me with her. Dragged us to our deathbed together and whatever passed between us passed between us. And hours later, a lifetime later, I woke up. I went inside and cleaned up and lost consciousness again. Stacey didn’t wake up and she didn’t come home and I found her in the alley later without even remembering, all because of the damage to my brain.
 
There’s no such thing as ghosts and haunted houses
, Detective Bergen said.
 
Only symptoms.
 
I lost track of time. I lost my car keys. The forgotten trips to the storage locker. Things out of place in the house. Her image in the window, in Mr Ennis’s house.
 
Symptoms.
 
The ability to remember what Stacey looked like, every lovely detail of her beautiful face erased from memory. The laundry I forgot I had folded. My damaged memory.
 
Symptoms.
 
Voices on the phone. Echoes from my grieving self. The gun Hermes gave me a year ago, not two months ago. Bergen caught on the gun discrepancy because time had become elastic, folded plastic.
 
The numbing. The gaps in memory. The constant headaches. The red rabbits.
 
Symptoms.
 
I’m not Ghost. There was no ghost in West Adams.
 
Only a damaged man. James Hastings reborn.
 
40
 
The screen door opened with a slow creaking and latched softly. When I looked up she was standing at the entrance, the afternoon sun from the broken window lighting strands of her white hair and dappling the soft, faded cotton of the violet and navy banded rugby shirt she stole from James in college. Seeing her caught so, my memory -
his
memory - dilated, inhaling her, devouring all we had forgotten before our anniversary.
 
Her small nose and low cheekbones and wide-set eyes of blue. The way her teeth set next to each other smooth and straight. Her thick lips pink over the clean line of her chin. The shape of her ears, so small, their lobes tight against her jaw. The hopeful tension in her small shoulders, the fullness of her hips. Her breasts pushing the fabric that contained them in correct proportion. The exact shade of her hair damp, clean and pulled back, her skin aglow. Her hands bunched at her sides and her eyes glassing over with tears, every part of her combining into the whole, filling the void in me better than a puzzle piece, as if my fingertips - the fingertips of his mind - were reading the Braille of her DNA.
 
Our Stacey.
 
‘I had to,’ she said, ignoring the corpse between us. ‘He was going to kill you.’
 
I wanted to smile but I couldn’t hold my head up or make my face work that way.
 
‘I couldn’t find you,’ she said. ‘He hid you from me and I was lost. I’m so sorry, my love. I came back for you. I won’t ever leave you again.’
 
She came closer and kneeled beside me. His love for her inside me was like a flame feeding on every forest fire in California, and it engulfed me.
 
She kissed my neck, whispered in my ear. ‘Come with me, Jameson. Let’s go home.’
 
But here, up close, I could see the scars. Thread lines under her chin where another scalpel had been used, at her request. More healing lines behind her jaw and ears. The swollen, still faint blue-purple from her nose resetting, and the pink rawness around her eyes, the mask skin pulled tighter in every direction. The transparent ridges of her blue contact lenses.
 
Not our Stacey. The monster healing.
 
This was where she had been for the past few weeks while I was his prisoner. What had she told the doctor? Had she taken a photo of Stacey and said, this is the one? Make me look like her?
 
‘I had to,’ she said, seeing me wrestle with it. ‘I couldn’t stand the way you looked at her when you looked at me. I knew it wouldn’t be real for you unless I changed the outside, too. I did the best I could. It’s me, James. I’m in here. You know it’s true.’
 
I wet my tongue. ‘Why?’
 
‘Why?’ she said, her eyes glistening. ‘You needed me. You would have taken your own life. I used everything to reach you. I took her for you. I got rid of Lucy for you. Look at me. Once I had Annette, I called Lucy every night. I went into her bedroom and taped her mouth and told her things. I told her what would happen if she didn’t do what I said - but I did it for you. I chased her away for you. I got rid of them all so we could be together.’ She looked at the dead man on the floor beside us. Dead Rick Butterfield. Her own brother. ‘I set you free. Do you think Annette would be capable of killing her own brother for you? It’s me, you know it’s me. Don’t you know by now? Don’t you know?’

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