“Hyde Hall! Esther, let’s try Hyde Hall. I have an inkling. Hyde is a homonym for hide, as in hiding out. Also for buffalo hide, the native dress of Sheila’s people.”
Deronda weighed in. “Dr. Federman . . .”
“Danny, please call me Esther.”
“Very well, Dr. Federman. Why don’t we honor Jack’s surmise and pay a quick visit? Nowhere is it written in the Torah that Sheila Drake is not to be found at Hyde Hall.”
Deronda’s special pleading swayed her. We raced down Route 20 to the northern end of Otsego Lake, over a covered bridge and through the gatehouse. There sat Hyde Hall. And just then getting out of a BMW were Ohnstad, Tarbox, Tabby, and Harris! This was a convergence, in itself a minor paranormal event.
“What are you people doing here?” I asked.
Ohnstad quickly narrated the sequence of events that brought them to the mansion. Sheriff Tarbox had reconsidered and formed a search party despite the violation of protocol. It was he who set the list of targets, largely based on where he thought the Cardiff Giant might like to drop by. First, the Ommegang Brewery, functioning memorial of the days when Otsego County produced a good percentage of the nation’s hops, a thriving farm industry put out of business by Prohibition. Tarbox reasoned that the giant must have an intolerable thirst with all that dry gypsum to lug around. Maybe he and his abductee fell into a vat. The brewery’s famed receptionist, a large calico cat, led the search party from room to room of painted stucco. Tarbox stood on a ladder and peered into two vats of Belgium specialty malts, offending the aged brewmaster who had insisted there were no bodies floating there. Then to the freak sideshow at the Otsego County Fair, where some of the personnel were newly hired from leftovers at the Holy Ravioli convention, including a bearded fat lady who practiced Tai Chi, imagined that she had three heads, and answered to the name of Medusa. She had asked the Holy Ravioli to remove her tattoos. Ohnstad said he hoped he was beholding a hologram, for Medusa otherwise merited a large donation of human sympathy.
“Lady, did the Cardiff Giant pass through here with one Sheila Drake, maybe lookin’ fer a job?” Tarbox asked.
“You crazy? You crazy? You crazy?”
Then they were off to the Russian Orthodox monastery at Jordanville, where Tarbox asked surly questions of monks long sworn to a life of silence and sleeping on wooden beds with no mattresses. A monastery would provide convenient cover for an alien plot. No luck. Then to a balloon festival at New Berlin, where the search party boarded a hot-air balloon advertising Halliburton and tried to spot giant and maiden from the air.
Tired of these initiatives, Ohnstad suggested Hyde Hall. The Antiques Roadshow, just beginning a three-day gig, was settled in there. Sheila liked to pick up antiques to use as props. Maybe she wasn’t missing at all.
“Not a chance,” said Tarbox. “Everybody knows giants don’t go ter no antique garbage heaps.”
But he was outvoted, and off they went. Tarbox claimed exemption, but the rest of us prepared to pay the two-dollar cover and wait in line outside the mansion, little knowing we’d be encountering the most paranormal paranormality of them all.
— Chapter Sixteen —
GIRLS, INTERRUPTED
Hyde Hall isn’t your typical American country mansion. Those who know say it is the finest Greek Revival structure the Northeast can boast, with fifty rooms, an elegant spiral staircase and interior courtyard, and flush toilets. You don’t know right away that you’re looking at so large a structure, with its squat and severe façade, all the charm of a mausoleum. Its builder, George Hyde Clarke, wished to remain an English gentleman, practicing Anglicanism and serving mutton chops to the end. His son, succeeding him, loosened his collar and gave lavish dinner parties after which the front plateau, the billiard room, and the great dining hall were festooned with snoring drunks.
Upon entering, you find to your left, an imposing drawing room and to your right, a dining hall set for twenty. People queued through these two rooms and out the portal, clutching antiques and awaiting appraisers. Among them were Tony Homero and Hazel Bouche. Homero was carrying three of his own cork-lined bats that had walloped balls out of stadiums in bases-loaded ninth innings of Game Seven in three World Series. Bouche was carrying the very voodoo pins she’d stuck into the effigy of the diva she bench-warmed for at the Met. I was relieved to find Homero there with Bouche. Yes, I was crazy, crazy, crazy.
Others schlepped polyester disco suits in powder blue, an early twentieth-century crib mattress with original tag admonition, a 1980s plastic duck decoy, a box of blue glass Noxzema jars, a crate of empty 1950s pharmaceutical pill bottles, a cargo of Burma-Shave signs, a “Draw Me” matchbook collection, and a bagful of steering-wheel knobs featuring Vargas girls.
Unlike what is edited down for broadcast on PBS, most of these locals expressed indignation at the low appraisals. “Fifty cents, if you’re lucky.” “Those stains in no way add to the value of the mattress.” “Sorry, these Burma-Shave signs are forgeries. You can tell by the word cow plop rhyming with lap top, an anachronism.” Among the items rating more than fifty cents were a Flub-a-Dub marionette in the original box, a 1924 Reed & Barton loving cup for a champion Aberdeen-Angus, and three vintage Little Black Sambo piggy banks that swallowed pennies on slices of watermelon.
The collector of steering-wheel knobs flew into a rage at the Christie’s appraiser and was forcibly evicted by the Antiques Roadshow’s bouncer. “I think we’d have better luck in Peoria,” I overheard one appraiser say.
All this I took in while Tarbox went through a homeland-security check to gain permission to search the premises. Huddled for an hour with Esther while Tabby and Harris conversed with rich Ohnstad and richer Deronda, I quietly pried out more on her early years with her half-sister. Since by now you know I’m no psychologist, their relationship had me baffled.
“Sibling rivalry? Yes, Jack, there was plenty because we competed for the occasional morsel of our father’s affection. We were always ratting on each other . . . Yes, Mary Baker Eddy was behind this. She taught him to love God and not fret too much about the rotten kids . . . No, Christian Scientists see no contradiction in loving God and getting rich . . . Yes, we both came down with all the childhood diseases because he wouldn’t let us get vaccinated . . . I agree, it’s hard to figure why he married a Jew, then a half-breed, or why they married him, except he was rich. The moment he gained custody after my mother’s death, he took me out of Hebrew School. I think he was an anti-Semite . . . No, he never mentioned my dead mother around the house. I started having dialogues with her ghost when I was ten, told Sheila about them, and she ratted on me. She was seven, old enough to know the stakes. Our father was furious, said it was an insult to my stepmother. The evil stepmother seemed to agree . . . she was always giving Sheila gifts, I was lucky to get a lump of coal . . . Traumas? Well, once I stole her Indian Barbie doll and ripped out the feathers and papoose. My stepmother caught me and whipped me good . . . Sheila hated him too—she didn’t know how much at the time—but the furrier wouldn’t let her have a real live kitten, only a stuffed one. She wept for a week.”
At this moment an anorexic woman in her eighties wearing a floral flour sack dress cut in line. She was carrying a stuffed pheasant with a loose head and lice-eaten feathers. Her timing was good, so we didn’t object. I felt a little like Thor as I resumed my interrogation, asking if Esther had anything to add to her sorry tale of the furrier father.
“Three years ago a psychic uncovered a buried memory of sexual abuse by our father when Sheila was six months old. She’s still convinced of it, but this may be the only thing the ogre wasn’t guilty of . . . Right, Christian Scientists don’t believe in sex. He tried to convince me there was no difference between girls and boys. That was my sex education until I found out for myself with Freddy, down the block . . . Yes, in Back Bay, just around the corner from the Mother Church . . . What happened to my father? Dead by an infected hangnail. He refused treatment when it turned gang
renous, left all his money to the church—my stepmother tried to sue for her fifty percent but lost through some technicality . . . Sheila and I bonded after his death, rediscovered each other, figured out the grounds of our rivalry . . . Yes of course we have relapses, who doesn’t? Those old family structures never die, they just fade away a little. Go ask Freud.”
Tarbox got his search warrant. We started with the wine cellar and worked our way up—Esther, Deronda, Ohnstad, and I, with Tabby and Harris holding reality TV cameras. The sad truth about Hyde Hall was soon obvious. The restoration was moving at such a leaden pace that the restored portions were already falling back into ruin just as the unrestored rooms were taking their turn.
Esther was getting anxious about the fate of her half-sister and was flummoxed that Kabbalah had let her down again. “I should put it to Rabbi Isaac Luria. Which of the 613 commandments did I break? Where are the Malakhim now that we need them?” Deronda nodded at me, signaling approval of this newfound skepticism. I nodded back.
We tried out-of-the-way places—the nut room, the butler’s pantry, the laundry, the china closet, the library. No Sheila. We were getting ready to ascend the grand staircase when Ohnstad shouted, “The chapel! Let’s try the chapel!” We went down the hall to the vestibule, passed the library again, and turned left. The chapel was tucked away behind the library, a carefully guarded secret at Hyde Hall because the senior Clarke had insisted in his will that nothing other than Anglicanism be practiced on the premises. Heaven forbid that a Unitarian might wander through his chapel.
The portal was covered by a large buffalo hide. Ducking under it with their cameras running, Tabby and Harris were the first in.
“Just keep doing what you’re doing,” they said with all the aplomb of cinema verité adepts. To whom were they speaking? I followed, then Esther, Deronda, and finally Ohnstad. We beheld a ritual in progress at the altar.
It was the support group of seven ageing county-fair beauty queens attired in their now ill-fitting coronation gowns, gathered around someone lying facedown upon the altar. This person was wrapped in another buffalo hide, with only nose, eyes, and hair showing. But it was clear that this was Sheila!
The beauty queens were chanting something that sounded like a cross between redneckese and speaking in tongues. Fourteen hands were laid on Sheila’s body through the buffalo hide. At one end stood a man I remembered having spoken to briefly at the benefit. He was a convicted Enron inspirational speaker who had done his time and mastered a related skill while in prison, through the state-run occupational-rehab program. “Regression Therapy Hypnosis” is what they called it.
I began to put clues together. These folk had absconded with Sheila late in the benefit, now three days removed. I took inventory of the chapel. Yes, there was evidence of leftovers from the benefit itself—cheese-dip containers, empty bottles of Ommegang malt, German sausage tips, and other refuse strewn on the pews. The chapel was only three rooms from the larder, and other half-eaten comestibles were littered about, suggesting that what we were witnessing had been in progress for some time.
The Indian reservation gift shop had been visited—taped to the walls and hanging off the altar were replica stone pendants with turtle carvings, a sculpture of a clan mother, some baskets woven in black ash, many fake tomahawks and arrowheads, a fake bow and quiver, and some fake False Faces. And there sat Sheila’s own shamanic drum.
The inspirational Enron speaker took note of the new audience, gesturing that we approach the altar. He looked like a television evangelical preacher, with slicked and dyed black hair, a plump oily pink face, and utterance so unctuous I was soon made queasy. He began beating Sheila’s drum and trying to speak at the same time.
“Fellow goyim,” he began, “you have entered this sacred precinct near the end of a sacred ritual. We will witness the primal rebirthing of Sherry Duke . . .”
“Sheila Drake,” interjected a beauty queen.
“Ah yes, of course. Sheila Drake, who until now has been only one-quarter Heron. She will become Red Blanket Ontario, a whole Heron.”
“That’s Red Blanket Orontony,” put in a beauty queen.
“Ah yes, of course, Orontony. We have worked around the clock to bring the repressed whole Heron to the surface.” He beat the drum. “Red Blanket has entered her subconscious and has beheld the whole primal Heron she was as princess daughter of . . . Oratonme, the great Heron chieftain. Red Blanket has discovered that all her present issues are owing to what befell the princess in this prior life.”
“Did he say Heron?” whispered Deronda, looking troubled. “I thought Sheila was one-quarter Huron. She does not look much like a bird, not to me at least.”
“Well, she does have a long skinny neck,” I observed.
“What befell her was this . . .” continued the man from Enron, drumming arrhythmically, “hmmm, I seem to forget what befell her . . . a prompt, please.”
“Her betrothal, her betrothal,” offered one of the beauty queens.
“Oh yes! She was betrothed to a great Heron warrior who demanded a dowry of ten thousand wonton.”
“Doesn’t he mean wampum?” asked Esther.
“When the chief failed to come up with the wonton, the princess was duty bound to jump off a cliff, for that was the tradition. We know this was a prior life experience because whenever Red Blanket gets too close to a man, she feels like jumping off a cliff.”
“At least the princess did her traditional duty,” whispered Deronda.
“Now Sherry Duke will undergo a rebirthing and come out the other end a full Heron, with the wonton she needs for total self-realization. Girls, start pushing!”
The seven faded beauty queens pushed against the birth canal of buffalo hide in the direction of Sheila’s feet. I watched her chin, nose, and forehead disappear, while at the other end, her feet emerged, then her knees, groin, and belly. One of the beauty queens began dumping gallons of water from a bucket down the canal, breaking the waters, I guess.
We heard muffled gurgles from within the hide. Tabby and Harris zoomed in their cameras, knowing the ratings went up whenever lives were at stake. Ohnstad had been watching with the fidgets, and now he stepped ahead of Esther and me as we sought to intervene.
“But Mr. Ohnstad, this was your idea!” said the inspirational speaker. “Stand aside!”
The beauty queens chanted, “Push! Push! Rebirth! Rebirth!”
Sure enough, out popped Sheila from the other end of the hide. She was buck naked and, for a moment, assumed a fetal position and blinked. Then she squatted upright and shook water from her limbs like a duck.
“Hey, Sheila,” said Esther, “good to have you back with us. May we fix you a nice cup of herbal tea? Does somebody have a large organic towel?”
Deronda averted his eyes from the vibrant female flesh. The seven beauty queens now laid hands on her again—and the inspirational speaker threw aside the drum, laying on his own hands for good measure. You’re supposed to rub the newborn for circulation, right? But we couldn’t help noting that some parts were getting rubbed more than others—so we readied for another intervention.
Suddenly, Sheila jumped up and emitted a series of kucks, then a loud skyow, and then a skewk.
“That’s the cry of Butorides striata, the green-backed heron,” said Deronda, a fiddler whose other avocation was bird-watching. “They feed on insects and seek out swamps and lakes.”
“Let’s catch her, quick,” cried Ohnstad. “Tarbox, bring your net!”
They were too late, for Sheila, flapping her arms in wing beats, stretched her neck, pushed her hair into a shaggy crest, and jerked her tailbone. She snatched a large moth with her beak and swallowed, then flew out of the chapel. We chased after her down the hallway, but she eluded us, lilting across the courtyard to the stair hall. The courtyard was filled with disgruntled people showing their recently devalued family junk to one another and seeking validation. When the naked birdlike form of Sheila flew through their midst,
they gawked. “Well forevermore, what’s that?”
Her arms still flapping, she swooped up the vertiginous staircase to the elongated billiard room on the third floor. Hyperventilating, I too reached the billiard room, screaming “Sheila! Sheila!—please stop!” just in time to see her perched on the ironwork outside the casement. She was stretching her wings, eager to set off. As I ran toward her, her muscles tensed, she let out a final skewk!—and there she went, tumbling off the iron grating headfirst, her legs upright and disappearing, as my heart leapt up in astonishment and despair.
— Chapter Seventeen —
KNOTS UNTIED
I ran out the portico fearing what a thirty-foot vertical dive does to a human neck. There was Sheila wriggling around and flapping and still emitting kucks, skyows, and skewks from underneath the Alien Constraint Net.
“Nabbed her,” said Tarbox. “Keep yer distance, folks. She’s dangerous—yah gotta know this here is alien possession. Any exorcists?” Sheila was already surrounded by Antiques Roadshow rejects looking down at the naked bird-lady. Still aghast, I approached her but was beat out by Ohnstad, who knelt and cried “Sheila! Sheila! I didn’t want this! Please forgive me, love!”
His pallor and dropped jaw were the equal of my own. I didn’t know what he was talking about. A quick survey revealed she hadn’t suffered any bruises, the discolorations being leftover poison sumac. While Ohnstad grasped one flapping hand through the net, I held on to the other and cried, “Sheila, it’s Jack—come to, sweetheart, and be my love. You’re a Huron, not a heron!”
The kucks, skyows, and skewks gradually gave way to human utterance. “Where am I? Who am I?—skyow—Is that you, Jack?” Then her pupils disappeared again above the whites of her eyes.
I looked up long enough to see the Enron felon shake his head and slink away.
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