The Haunting of James Hastings (49 page)

Read The Haunting of James Hastings Online

Authors: Christopher Ransom

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

 
I suppose it is obvious now why I picked this thread up again. I needed to remember the good things, too. But that is not the only reason. Celia and I have been carrying on this way for some months, and something strange happened last night. I don’t remember the event, but she insists it happened, so I think it is wise to make note of it. It is important to keep a clear mind about these things, and the day may soon come when contributing to this file becomes impossible.
 
So, for now . . .
We were having breakfast this morning on the back patio. Celia had just finished feeding Eddie his scrambled eggs and toast and he was eager to be free of his chair, so she helped him down and let him run into the yard. He quickly submerged himself into an imaginary game involving his toy dinosaurs and the plastic fire engine on the grass beside us. I was half awake and staring into my coffee cup, thinking of nothing, but the words she spoke next roused me into full alertness.
‘James, there’s something we need to talk about.’
Celia had always been a morning person, but her face was drawn and her hair lacked its usual luster. She looked thirty-eight instead of twenty-six, as though she had not slept well, and I tried to conceal the little bolts of anxiety coursing through my veins.
‘Do you - you don’t remember last night, do you?’
I cocked my head.
‘I woke up around three thirty and you weren’t in bed. I couldn’t get back to sleep right away. I thought you had gone to the bathroom, like you sometimes do.’
I said nothing.
‘After twenty minutes or so, I was worried something was wrong with Edward, but I couldn’t hear anything from the speaker, so I didn’t think you were in with him.’
The coffee in my stomach turned to cold acid. I looked away, watching Eddie in the yard. The dinosaur had the firemen trapped in their rig and was battering the doors and windows with a taunting patience and taste for cruelty that was frankly disturbing.
‘I checked the bathroom first,’ Celia continued. ‘But you weren’t in there, so I went downstairs. The kitchen and living rooms were empty. I checked your office, but you weren’t downstairs either.’
Please. Not in the ballroom again.
She squeezed my hand. She was smiling but her palm was moist. Moist and cool.
‘You were in Eddie’s room,’ she said. Her eyes widened with encouragement, as if I were a bad student who had finally made good. Gold star for James.
‘And?’ I gritted my teeth. ‘What was I doing?’
‘Sleeping, silly. You were sleeping in his bed.’
‘My God, how? Was I crushing him?’
‘No. Your legs were hanging over the end. It was sort of cute. The way you were clinging to him.’
I don’t know why, but my embarrassment bordered on shame. ‘I must have heard him crying or something.’
‘No. You couldn’t have heard him crying, and I would have woken up if he had been. You know what a light sleeper I am. No, he was sleeping like a dog.’
‘Like a log, you mean.’
‘Yes, like you used to.’
I shook my head in an attempt to wake up. The morning sun was beating down on my face and I felt I was going to be sick.
‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘What do you mean “used to”? I sleep like the dead. I’ve been sleeping so well I don’t even remember my dreams.’
‘That’s what I’m telling you, honey,’ she said. ‘Don’t get so defensive. I just wondered if you knew.’
‘Knew what? Obviously I don—’
‘That this wasn’t the first time,’ she interrupted. ‘Last night wasn’t the first time, James. The other times you were downstairs. On the couch.’
‘How many times?’
‘Oh, jeez, I don’t know. Eight, maybe ten?’
I closed my eyes. The sun infected me like a fever.
‘When did it start?’
‘A month ago, maybe a little longer. I didn’t think anything of it at first, James.’ When she said my name again, her voice hardened. ‘But after last night, I don’t know . . . seeing you cling to Eddie that way, like you were trying to hide him, I couldn’t help feeling like you don’t want me to come near him.’
My chair seemed to be rocking on soft land.
‘No,’ I said. ‘That’s not true.’
‘No?’
I forced myself to look at Celia. ‘No. I promise.’
‘It’s just sleepwalking, then?’
‘Yes.’
She watched me a moment. ‘All right.’
We didn’t speak for another minute and I relaxed.
‘The only other thing, though,’ she said. ‘The reason you couldn’t have heard him crying, even if he was, which he wasn’t?’
Needle needle. Always needling me . . .
‘You turned off the speaker in his room, James.’
I had turned off the wireless walkie-talkie?
‘And the one next our bed,’ Celia said. ‘You turned that one off, too.’
‘Why would I do that?’ I said.
So she wouldn’t hear the other voices.
‘That’s what I asked you last night, when you woke up. When you sat up and looked at me in the doorway like you didn’t know who I was.’
She leaned back in her lawn chair and tucked a lock of her hair behind her ear, pouting. Her lips were thin, so thin and clean, not thin like the other’s. I wanted to kiss them. Suck them and hurt them and bite them off.
She hiccuped once, and wiped the tip of her nose.
Inside I felt a familiar warmth I had not known for a long time. Years, years that seemed like only yesterday.
‘You’ve never looked at me that way before, James. Your eyes . . .’
I looked at our son playing on the lawn, our beautiful boy that needed a real mother, not this . . . ingratiating
child
.
I turned and showed her my eyes, all of my eyes. ‘And what did I say?’
I heard Celia’s response before she spoke it. Heard it inside the canals of my ears, in the folds of my gray matter mind, in the once empty and cold corner of my now warm, bursting soul.
It’s nicer this way.
Acknowledgements
 
I’d like to thank Nikola Scott, my editor at Sphere, who offered scalpel-sharp insights into the early drafts of this novel, but wielded said scalpel with soft white gloves and plenty of intelligence, charm, and grace. We’ll miss you. Also, my deepest gratitude to David Shelley, who believed in the project before I had written the first word. Without you and your team at Little, Brown, I would still be stuck in second gear. And to Dan Mallory, who embraced the final draft and applied his enthusiasm to the launch.
 
 
Many thanks to Scott Miller, who trusted me when I said I knew what I was doing and it would all make sense when I finished.
 
 
And finally to a VIP trio: Eminem, Slim Shady, and Marshall Mathers, without whose fearless forays into the dark side, addictive motherfuckin’ beats, and lyrical genius this novel would not have been written. Another one, perhaps, but not this one. Your flow was the gasoline in the engine of my inspiration while I scratched this out, so thank you for having a killer relapse.
 

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