City of Masks Page 12

  Lila heard Jack's voice in the hall as Ronald headed toward the front of the house: "Hey, Ro-Ro. Done with your sibling heart-to-heart? Sure you don't want to stay on for supper, now?"

  Ron's answer was to slam the front door.

  Lila squeezed a glob of cerulean blue into the dimple in the little plastic palette. This was probably hopeless. In the past, she'd found some comfort in painting, but that, like everything else, seemed to have been taken from her. She wished her hands would stop shaking.

  The sun was setting, sending long shafts of peach-colored light through the west-facing window of her second-floor studio. The room had been a walk-in closet before she'd set it up to get her painting stuff out of the rest of the house, and it was cramped, too small for the worktable, drafting stool, easel, bureau, and shelves she'd put in. The table held several jars of brushes, a cubbyhole for her paint tubes, and the easel she almost always used, a little table-mounted tripod just the right size for smaller canvases.

  Just outside the door, she heard a floorboard creak and knew it was Jackie, finding excuses to walk by, wanting to talk to her but not mustering the resolve to intrude into her sanctum. She'd fled to her closet as much to get away from his well-meaning, ineffectual concern as to paint. Especially after the drinks he'd downed with Ro-Ro, he'd be too maudlin and suffocating to bear. Though his compassion for her was genuine, it was so infused with male condescension for the weaker sex and so diluted by his own insecurity as to be worthless. It meant his solicitousness was really something of a shoehorn by which he hoped he could ease her back into her prior state of mind, her prior role, their prior life. And she didn't fit any more.

  She worked her way through the blues and into the greens, a circle of rainbow on the white palette, then began with the earth tones.

  As she'd feared, returning to the house and telling about the horrors had awakened it all again. The frightful images, the awful memories kept springing suddenly up into her thoughts. The world had become a frightening place, as pliant as a dream, where nothing held certain, where things twisted and distorted and became other things - bad things. But unlike a nightmare, you couldn't wake up from it.

  And though she'd clutched some slight reassurance from her meetings with Cree Black, it had all been swept away by her talk with Ron, which seemed to promise another horrible secret, another awful transformation. He'd been trying to say something and couldn't find the words, or she couldn't hear them right, and he'd given up on her. It sounded as if he'd been pleading with her, asking her to understand that he could be in danger. "Something I did . . ." The only thing she could think of was Temp Chase, the horrible murder. Was he suggesting that he killed Temp?k That somehow her moving back to the house could expose him? How could it possibly?

  She wrestled with it for a time: If she knew that Ron had killed someone, would she protect him from the consequences of his crime? No. Yes. Maybe. Depends.

  It didn't quite make sense. Even if Ron had done something like that, he'd never let anyone hear a hint of it, he'd never show his hand even if he was falling-down drunk. No, that wasn't quite it, that wasn't exactly what he was trying to say.

  Of course, maybe that whole talk in the kitchen was just Ron being Ron, being manipulative and greedy and trying to prevail upon her sympathy and family loyalty to get what he wanted. Exploiting her confusion and distress right now. That she could easily see. Except he'd seemed too sincere, too vulnerable. But what, then?

  She realized she had a tube of paint in her hands and didn't know what color it was or whether she'd put any on the palette yet. She read the label, alizarin crimson, and squeezed some out. Yes, it was time for the reds now. One after the other, they came out like half-congealed blood. The pigment got on her trembling fingers when she tried to replace the caps, and the idea of so much red on her hands, flowing from her, struck her as appealing.

  There was always that, wasn't there. There would be respite in that, surely.

  Behind all the specific images, the snake and the table and the wolf and even the boar-headed man, loomed a dark, impenetrable storm cloud, turbulent and cruel. And perhaps the scariest thing was the knowledge that though she saw or felt that cloud only now, after the events at the house, it was a familiar menace. It had been there before the ghost. It had always been there. She had lived her whole life in its shadow. And she didn't know what it was.

  She completed laying out the paint, set the palette aside, and wiped her hands clean on a towel. From the shelf she selected a canvas board the size of a hardcover book and propped it in the table easel. She stared at it, trying to imagine what she would paint on it. It seemed at once too small and too vast an expanse to deal with.

  The floorboards creaked in the hall, Jackie just happening to pass by. She felt a twinge of compassion for him: The poor thing was beside himself.

  She'd better get control of herself, she decided, stop all this hysterical, self-indulgent, overblown dramatizing. She was only making things worse for everyone. Show some spine! Manage your house, manage your family, manage your mind. Don't call attention. Look at the state Jackie is in.Think of the kids! Consider the others. Consider the Beauforte name. Consider your own self-respect! If you can't change it, and can't master your feelings, then ignore it. What choice do you have? You just do what you have to do. Get on with it. You have to take hold of your problems and fears and willy-nilly emotions and hysteria and confusion and stuff them back inside where they belong. Where they don't show.

  After another moment of staring at the blank canvas, hating herself for her weakness, she put it away and took a smaller one from the shelf. This was scarcely larger than her hand, one of the boards she'd had the frame shop make up specially. "I paint miniatures," she'd explained to the man."Oh, yes, I know just what you want," he'd told her. "Many of our housewife artists want the same."

  She stared at the little rectangle of white and then decided that it was too big, that what she really needed was a matchbook-sized one. No, a postage-stamp-sized one.

  No, a dot. A nothing.

  12

  IN THE DARKNESS, THE HOUSE seemed bigger, more formidable and somehow more distant, tucked back into the foliage. All the nearby houses had warm lights in their windows, and many had gas lamps flickering on their porches, but Beauforte House struck Cree as hollow and forlorn, lost in the leafy shadows thrown by streetlights. She wondered if it had been wise to turn down the cheerful, if distracting, companionship of Paul Fitzpatrick.

  She shivered involuntarily as she opened the iron gate and shut it behind her. It wasn't just the darkness and the empty windows; reading Joyce's materials on the Chase murder had filled her mind with bad images that were hard to dispel.

  Joyce had e-mailed a note chastising Cree for not telling her earlier that this case might involve an unsolved murder, which they'd all agreed added unacceptable dimensions of risk and complication to a case. But as Cree had hoped, she'd done the work anyway and had attached a good collection of news stories about the incident: a cluster of articles from two years ago and then increasingly sporadic items from the following months.

  The basic facts were simple. After his eleven o'clock show one night, Temp Chase had come home, sat down for a snack, and been shot dead by somebody who came into the house. His wife had been gone, visiting her parents just north of New Orleans, and had returned to find the body. Later articles revealed that Temp Chase's outwardly perfect life had some serious flaws. He had a drinking problem; he had recently lost money in bad investments. Even his prestigious job at WNOW, New Orleans's largest TV station, was in jeopardy; he'd been news anchor there for twelve years, but station management had been talking about replacing him with someone younger. There were rumors he'd been consorting with organized crime elements in New Orleans and Baton Rouge.

  People died by all kinds of means, but murder victims made for bad ghosts. Not in the same league as suicides, but they were the psychic residuals of people torn suddenly from life, unwilling to let go,
dying in an explosion of pain and fear and agonized clinging. Hard for an empath to endure.

  So why come here at ten o'clock at night, alone, vulnerable? Cree asked herself. She almost chuckled when she realized the mental voice she'd used was Fitzpatrick's continuing his game of twenty questions. She answered in her own voice: Because while it scares the crap out of me, and my partner thinks it'll kill me one day, I love this. Being at the edge of the ultimate mystery.

  Of course, she knew it wasn't that simple. Edgar knew, too, Deirdre and Mom knew. There was a lot more, the Mike stuff, probably a death wish thing, too, but that was all too sad and complex and this wasn't the time to get mired in it.

  She turned on her little flashlight, casting a tight spot of light on the door handle, then used the key Lila had given her to unlock it. She pushed it open. The house exhaled its stale breath. She stepped inside, shut the door behind her, and disarmed the security system as Jack had instructed her. She turned off the flashlight.

  Darkness.

  It would be easy enough to turn on the lights, but she left it as it was. She took a few steps into the hall, the dark absolute and cottony quiet.

  Fitzpatrick would not understand what had to come next. It was not rationally explicable or defensible. It was unpredictable and took many forms. Cree could imagine him asking more of his "childish" and completely reasonable questions: Why do people almost always see ghosts at night? Aren't they wandering around all the time?

  Because, Cree answered, in the dark our other senses come more alive. Because at night our neurochemistry changes. Because the competing sounds and sights of human activities quiet down, and we can see and hear subtler things.Because the bright mental beacons of the living are quenched in sleep all around, and we can sense fainter, more fitful glimmers. Because in the disorientation of dark we become aware of our own unconscious activity. Because we let go of the ordinary and are no longer bound or protected by it.

  Serious ghost hunters did their work in the dark.

  Her eyes adapting, she began to make out slivers of mercury vapor light around the curtains in the big room to the right, and she walked toward the silvery outlines. It was at the far end of this room that Lila's signs had shown that first anomalous reading. Cree walked slowly back there and stopped.

  The dim faces of Beauforte relatives and ancestors stared back at her, and she felt the flutter, a dark moth beating softly, relentlessly, at an invisible window. But that was all. Something staying just beyond reach, nameless.

  After a time, she moved on into the rear parlor, where her vague reflection in the broken mirror startled her, and then felt her way into the hallway and the kitchen. It was a little brighter there, with its light yellow walls and windows that opened to the yard. At the far end a black rectangle loomed, the door to the hallway that led into the north wing.

  She turned to the right, toward the breakfast nook where Temp Chase's head had exploded.

  All around her, the old house seemed to inhale and hold its breath. Then she felt a wave rock her, a pressure front of compressed images and feelings, striking and passing too quickly to understand.

  "That you, Temp?" she whispered.

  There was no answer, just a fading aftertaste of fear, confusion, and surprise. She gave it several minutes, but nothing else happened and the feeling waned. After a time her heartbeat stopped shaking her, and she realized she felt oddly impatient, preoccupied, wanting to move on. As if some other part of the house were calling her.

  She let it guide her. Through the back hall to the library. She walked silently with the flashlight in her pocket, her hands out to either side,palms forward, the still air moving through her outspread fingers, cool.

  The library was pitch black. She found her way inside, located the piano bench with her thigh, and sat. From experience, she knew if anything came to her it would begin with the mood, the psychic weather, of the other presence. Vague at first, then defining itself as she probed its elements, it could happen fast or take weeks. If she were lucky and didn't recoil in panic and didn't get distracted, she could begin to see or hear it, tuning in to its experience of itself. If it preserved any interactivity at all, she could insinuate herself into its experience. Commune and, if possible, converse. Find its core impulse, its psychological engine. Free it from the bondage of its obsession. Break its tape loop.

  A psychotherapist for ghosts?

  Yes and no. A psychotherapist had to preserve objectivity, but the empathic ghost hunter had to abandon it to a large degree. To experience the ghost, she had to do more than identify with Lila, take on her attributes, feel what she felt - in a way, she had to virtually become her. And the same was true of the ghost: Before she could alleviate the haunting, she had to share the ghost's experience and learn what moved it, what obsessed it, why it lingered.

  The crucial thing in either case was to preserve a strong sense of your own identity and local reality. In the case of the ghost, especially, you could resonate so completely you became absorbed into it and came undone. That was the danger: that the ghost would break apart your obsession, your own illusion of life and self, and free you from your corporeal bondage. Everyone who had ever witnessed a ghost instinctively knew that, feared it. It was the fear that underlay all fears of the unknown, and it was a very real danger - especially for a synesthesic empath who as often as not didn't mind the idea of dying, of being subsumed and obliterated.

  What sort of ghost takes the form of a talking wolf, a man with a boar's head?

  Cree sat, trying to still her conscious thoughts. Outside, a car passed on the street, the bass of its stereo system audible even here, deep in the big house.

  Cree felt her mood drift toward a sense of melancholy, a vague impression of psychic motion. She let herself slip into it. Inside it were other emotions: a hard anger or wrath with overtones of righteousness, volatile, full of wild surges. But within that, she found something else, that keening again, a heart's call of sympathy or loyalty or protectiveness maybe, strong and clean and not at all bad. Regret, too. And confusion. It waxed gently and then waned, pale as a faint aurora borealis. Then it was gone.

  For a moment she wondered if what she sensed was just Cree Black, alone in a strange house in a strange city, sifting through her own crap. But no, she decided, it had a foreign flavor. Something or someone was there, just very faint. Could be from yesterday or a hundred years ago, could have nothing to do with Lila's experience, or everything.

  She waited but couldn't get a better sense of it. At last she decided she could do no more here. She left the library and walked silently back to the kitchen and to the front hall. At the bottom of the stairs, she felt a prickle along her back and neck, a tingle inside her elbows.

  Something upstairs.

  She went up the stairs with hands outstretched in the receiving pose. With the curtains open, there was more light here, the blue-silver of streetlights and the very faint, diffuse yellow of neighbors' windows. Light bleeding through the several doorways gave even the big, windowless central room enough illumination to navigate by. She turned left at the top of the stairs, toward the hallway that led to the master bedroom. The hallway of Lila's bounding wolf and pigheaded man.

  She lingered at the end of the hall, standing just where the shoe tips had appeared that first time. She stared down the dark corridor and tried to conjure in herself the resonance she'd felt with Lila. But beyond the vague, pregnant sense that something was there, nothing much came. After ten minutes her feet hurt from standing, and she moved on down the hall into the big bedroom.

  With the foliage over the windows, it was darker in here. She sat on the bed and stared at the fireplace, where the little coal stove was just a square of blackness in the bigger mass of coping. The broken mirrors of the armoires reflected only black.

  Time passed. The faint mottle of yellow on the ceiling vanished as the neighbors' lights were turned off. The darkness had a secret turbulence in it but nothing more defined.

&nbs
p; She gave it another half hour but then realized that her leg had gone to sleep and her head was bobbing. She had started to drowse. She stood, breathed deeply, flexed the pins and needles out of her foot. When she pressed the button on her watch, the blue-lit dial told her that it was after midnight.

  Obviously, despite her unusual projective identification with Lila, she wasn't ready yet. So far she'd found nothing of use. Really, not even a sure indication that Lila had experienced anything other than the symptoms of a psychosis or a neurological disorder.

  She went into the hallway and headed toward the front of the house. For a moment she felt the fatigue of the whole busy week descend on her and debated calling it quits. But as she came back into the central room at the top of the stairs, she felt an intuitive pull. The left front bedroom. She crossed over to it, determined to give this one more chance.

  Four steps through the doorway, she felt herself suddenly tugged - a feeling of vertigo as if she were swung or suspended on an elastic cord strung between two points. Immediately she saw where the sensation came from: the big mirror on the door of one of the armoires that served as closets in all the rooms. The mirror was seven feet tall and four wide and like the downstairs mirror was split with a single, long fissure. Now it looked like a window into some huge space - a dim, tapering corridor that stretched far beyond the walls of the house. Dim rooms and doorways and the silver-lit face and shadowy body of a woman.

  It took her a moment to recognize what she was seeing: By some accident, the mirror on this armoire was aligned with a similar mirror on the annoire on the other side of the room. A mirror tunnel. Cree lifted her hand, a gently curving file of half-silver-bright, half-shadowed women lifted their hands. A chorus line of streetlight-gilded Crees hung in tapering space, diminishing with distance and darkness.