“You have a strong tie to the spirit world and are capable of powerful communication, but are not participating. Her greatest wish is for you to learn to use your powers, to protect yourself and illuminate others. She will leave the world of the living forever on the day of illumination. Her life, created in evil and ended in self-destruction, will be absolved when you take action.” He slowly opens his eyes and looks directly at me.
“Do you have anything you would like to ask of her?”
“What does she see in my future?”
He blinks rapidly and his cheeks drain of their ruddy color.
“If you accept your unfolding fate, you are in profound danger. You must take another path, one that is foreign—beyond your imagination. You must recapture the bold spirit that helped you survive your childhood and use it to dispel the dark opposing forces. It will lead you to those who share the wisdom, the secrets of the cosmic forces of our universe.”
“I don’t understand. What does that mean?”
“There is a child...” he pauses and knits his brow into an expression of concern.
“She says there is a child who shares the gift, the power to feed into the spirit world, to receive messages through dreams, instinct, and psychic telepathy. He shares the knowledge of the ages, and is the son of the son and the architect of the shift.”
“None of it makes any sense.”
“She is fading away.” His voice now carries the melodic tone of his native tongue.
“The spirit has left, Alexandra. I am speaking now as an adviser.”
Kevin’s face has regained its color and he sits with legs crossed and elbows relaxed on the armrests of his chair.
“The language of spirits is often difficult to interpret. It is filled with words and symbols from the past and future, with a cosmic point of view. Their world is not encumbered by place, time, or matter. Interpretation of the language is individual; you must find the answers for yourself. Unfortunately, in this time of history, most cultures do not incorporate the Shaman, who dedicate their lives to spiritual matters. Your path will become clearer when you begin your search for your personal truth and find others who share your vision.”
“I have no vision, or even a plan. How do I search for my personal truth if I have no clue what I am looking for?”
“Devote yourself to your intuitions. The path to peace is not through ease and comfort; it is through acquired knowledge and self-discovery.”
A pleasant smile and nod are all I can muster. I will bear my hopeless prognosis and leave the box of tissues on the floor for the next lost soul.
“We must end now.”
I stand from the chair and move towards the door.
“Alexandra...”
I turn back to Kevin.
“You must protect the child.”
“Which child?”
“She didn’t say.”
With that, I exit the room.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE WOMAN IN THE RED SWEATER
“IN THE UNDERGROUND, YOU CAN HAVE SEX WITH A YOUNG LOVER and not worry about looking like an octogenarian when the sun rises. This is my favorite bar.” We enter a cocktail lounge lit entirely with black lights. The bras, miniskirts, and lipstick of the waitresses glow strangely in the dark.
“I’ll have a double martini with an olive and a twist,” Ruth says to a waitress with the lips of an enormous sea bass.
“Make that two.”
I turn to see a flash of red cloth and a radiant head near the front of the bar.
“Ruth, look... there at the entrance... do you see the woman in the red sweater with white hair? She has been following me all day.”
She glances behind her. “I don’t see anyone.”
“Standing by the door, behind the plant.”
I look back to an empty space.
“I think I’m going mad.”
“Kevin would say, ‘Show me someone who isn’t.’ I believe it’s all a matter of degree.”
“He told me I have a friendly ghost at my side.”
“Don’t look so glum, dear. And for God’s sake, don’t take it seriously. Kevin can get a little dramatic, a bit over the top occasionally. It’s really just entertainment.
“If you think your story is far-fetched, you won’t believe what he once told Ramey. He said he is a direct descendant of the great King Ramses of Egypt. Even more outlandish, he told Ramey that Ramses was a descendent of a master race of people from a distant planet, who colonized the earth eons ago. Of course, my dear husband loved that one; I couldn’t get him off his pedestal for weeks.”
The waitress sets down two frosty martinis in wide-rimmed glasses with double olives. Ruth hands the waitress a fifty, takes a couple of pills from a silver case, and dismisses the girl with a flick of her wrist.
“Kevin likes to shake people up and move them out of the status quo. His mission is to empower his clientele.
“Oh dear, your poor little ghost, standing here next to us and unable to take a sip of this delicious cocktail. That is a fate worse than death, I do declare.
“Here’s to life!” Ruth raises her glass in the air to join me in a toast. She pops the pills into her mouth, throws back her martini, and exhales a wicked, throaty laugh.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
RAMEY’S SECRET ROOM
“THE FOUNDING FATHERS OF MONTREAL SETTLED RIGHT HERE ON this street.” Ruth makes a quick turn onto an avenue lined with towering iron fences and small forests of sycamore trees protecting the mansions from view. Only rooftops are visible from the street, some featuring turrets and gables.
“Most made their fortunes in banking, the fur trade, and railroads. The Sandeley’s built one of the first houses, and this is the very place where Ramey grew up.
“Our house is one of the new ones on the block.”
A wrought-iron gate, centered with an S, opens and she brings the car to a halt in front of a palatial structure with porticos, balustrades, and dormered windows. I follow Ruth into a foyer with a magnificent sweeping staircase featuring a gargantuan mirror hung at the first landing. High above the stairwell, a mushroom chandelier throws off prisms of color that cascade down the pastel blue walls.
“It looks like you could walk through the glass into another world,” I say.
“I have almost walked through it, after a few too many cocktails,” Ruth says with a chuckle, as we enter a humid hallway inlaid with diamond-cut marble. One side of the expansive corridor looks into a verdant greenhouse, with plants slithering up the damp walls to the luminance of the glass ceiling. Skylights infuse the hall with streams of warm sunlight.
“The house has twenty-five rooms. In the old days, the master’s bedroom was his domain. The mistress had her own chamber, where she could sleep in peace after she got laid by the old goat. Great idea, eh? Our designer fashioned our bedrooms after the boudoirs of King Louis and Marie Antoinette in Versailles. He even placed replicas of their platform shoes and wigs on stands in our walk-in closets. My favorite wig is the one with the bird’s nest. Ramey’s closet is more elaborate than mine, with racks twirling at the touch of a button. He is quite the clotheshorse. You would never guess since he is such a slob at the lake, but he wears sport coats and suits for work and rarely wears anything more than once. A flaming queen from the chicest store in town stops by once a month to replenish the stock.
“You should have seen the look on his face when he returned from a business trip and walked into his bedroom. He’s having it redesigned in the style of the lord of the manor. Since he’s into rough sex, it’s probably better to get rid of all that lace. I’m keeping my room as it is—it’s great for girlie chats and role-playing. My favorite is to be raped wearing crinolines and a full bustle on a Sunday afternoon after high tea.
“The kitchen is modeled after our favorite restaurant in Paris. The rocks come from the Yangtze,” Ruth says as we enter a spectacular room fitted with top-of-the-line appliances and culinary gadgets.
&
nbsp; “Ramey and I do a lot of entertaining and hold fundraisers here, so I had it enlarged to accommodate a big staff. Last Christmas we flew in the head chef from the restaurant and had him recreate his most famous ten-course meal. The gala was attended by celebrities and politicos from all over the country. The press got shots of Ramey in the arms of a well-known seductress, which sold a lot of papers and created a load of gossip amongst the old blue bloods. But, truth is, I was the one she was after that night.”
“It’s stunning.”
“The cabinets are stained with a unique color my painter concocted for me. He calls it Cinnamon Raisin. He’s a hot little cinnamon raisin himself, with a great ass.” Ruth walks to a counter, picks up a wicker basket filled with limes, throws them into the sink and flips on the garbage disposal.
“Michelangelo’s David was carved from the same marble as the countertops; he came from the same quarry in Tuscany.
“Let me show you outside.”
She opens French doors and we walk out onto magnificent grounds, with multilevel landscaping surrounding a pool with water cascading into a double-tiered lagoon. A statue of Neptune, pitchfork in hand, regurgitates water from his open mouth into a second pond where a reclining mermaid holds a crescent shell.
“The lighting in the pool house is natural; there is no electricity. The fixtures are unique; the fluorescent pieces were extracted from deep inside underwater caves.”
We follow a slate path up to a pool house built in the shape of an igloo, with stacked half-circle windows. As we approach, fog misters send out clouds of refreshing dew to swirl around our feet. Spanning out from the domed structure, tables and chairs, carved from chunks of granite and covered with plump navy-blue cushions, straddle a brook trickling down cobblestone steps to an aquamarine grotto teaming with fish. The grotto is flanked by beds of stone laid out with stacked logs and tall bamboo torches. Beyond, there is the infinity of blue sky and the lulling sound of water streaming down to the pool below.
“Hello beautiful,” someone calls out. Ruth laughs as I look around me to see who is calling.
“That’s Rocky.” She points up to a lofty thatched tree house with a crude gangplank connecting it to a smaller fort. The conjoined hut has been designed as a makeshift observatory, with windows cut out and lined with varied sizes and shapes of metal telescopes. “Not a bad roost for a parrot, eh?”
She plucks a stem of cherries from an overhead branch. “It’s a special hybrid, as sweet and juicy as you will ever taste,” she says, and hands me the fruit.
“Delicious. You’ve got your own serenity garden,” I say as a hummingbird flits past me to peck at one of the small pouches dangling from strips of leather tied to the tree house.
“The slate used for the decks and pathways was mined from a quarry Ramey’s dad owned in India. He owned other mines in Africa, or is it Australia? Anyway, it’s one of those third-world countries with nasty insects and stinky primitives. I guess all the mines are ours now, since his dad’s passed on. I have zero knowledge of any of the business dealings—that’s Ramey’s domain. It’s all pretty hush-hush because of the wacky politics.”
She stops for a moment to pick rotting blossoms from a thorny rose bush lining the path leading back to the house.
“His dad was something of a mad scientist with a doomsday obsession. He believed the earth was in danger of imminent extinction, either man-made or natural. He traveled the globe, searching for hide-outs and resources to survive in case he had to go native. When Ramey was a child, his father would disappear for weeks at a time, living in the wild. He taught him everything he knew about survival. His dad told me he wanted his son brought up to be both a gentleman and savage man. Ramey’s tendency is to lean toward the latter category. A heart attack got the old man in the end.
“We’ll take the elevator downstairs. I need to get some towels and cotton blankets for the lake house.” I follow Ruth through the kitchen to a narrow shaft set into the corner.
“Ramey had a complete workout studio built downstairs,” she says, pushing a brass button. “He is a bit obsessed with his body, but trust me I’m not complaining. His ass is so hard you can flip a quarter on it and call heads or tails. It’s a nutcracker.
“The doors near the back windows lead to a sauna, steam, and a massage room,” she says as we step from the elevator into an area resembling an exclusive health club. “It sounds like the maids left the water running in one of the baths. I let them use the equipment after work when we’re not here. All the machines are the newest models. Take a spin on the Ryccho.” She motions to a lineup of stationary cycles at the end of the room. “I’ll be right back.”
I weave my way through an army of exercise machines to a replica of a fancy motorcycle. I am about to mount the seat when I notice a golden handle set into the wall in front of me, with mysterious-looking geometric symbols etched into its surface. The latch is mounted to a door nearly hidden in the surface of the wall. Moving to examine the handle, I see it is adorned with a series of overlapping concentric circles with an arrow piercing through the center. I pull down on the lever and it opens smoothly, releasing a blast of warm, stale air.
“No!” I hear Ruth call from behind me. “You can’t go in there. It’s Ramey’s private room.”
But, it is too late: the door is already open and I have switched on the light. Hanging from the ceiling is a skeleton of some horrible perversion of nature, dangling with another smaller version of something even more wretched. And there is more—too much to comprehend in a moment. Ramey’s room is a chamber of curiosities, a fantastical and bizarre collection of ancient and other-worldly artifacts.
“The room is a catastrophe—not fit for human eyes. It’s unusual for him to leave it unlocked,” Ruth says, coming up from behind me. “Now you’ve seen Ramey’s little hobby, his secret obsession, his father’s legacy. Come, before the awful sight begins to haunt you at night. We need to get back to the lake; it’s getting very late.” Ruth turns off the light and closes the door to Ramey’s secret room.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE ACCIDENT
WE’RE DINING AT UNCLE ROGER’S ESTATE TONIGHT. THERE WAS A men’s club meeting today and some of the boys are staying for dinner. I tried to get out of it, but no one refuses an invitation from Ramey’s uncle.” Ruth’s eyes blink rapidly as she speaks. She reaches into the glove box and retrieves a sunglass case, takes the glasses out, puts them on, takes them back off, replaces them in the case and returns it to the compartment.
In the drowsy silence I watch the countryside melt into a haze of sun falling on stalks of grain. Up the road, a clapboard farmhouse with green shutters sits at the end of a long drive. Horses and cows graze idly in the pasture surrounding the house near the barn. To the right of the property, a burly man in a horse buggy whips a lean thoroughbred around an oval racetrack surrounded by a whitewashed fence.
“When I was a little girl I used to sit on the fence at my grandfather’s farm and watch the neighbor’s horse and buggy races—”
The car suddenly lurches to the right and then careens off the road.
“Stop the car, stop the car, Ruth!”
I lean over to grasp the steering wheel, but her hands are stiff and unyielding. “Stop the car!” I fight for control of the vehicle as we head straight down a slope towards an enormous tree.
“The brakes! Hit the brakes!” I cover my face with my hands and am thrust forward in a gut-splitting lurch, then whiplashed back against the seat, as the vehicle slams to a halt. Through my fingers I look out the front window, beyond swirling dust, at the trunk of the tree—its bark broken by the vehicle’s front bumper.
“Ruth, my God, what happened?”
She sits rigid, with a frozen stare, and her skin is covered with ugly red blotches.
“What’s wrong?” I ask in a shallow whisper.
I want to comfort my friend, but there is something disconcerting about the angle of her neck.
“Please
talk to me. I don’t understand—”
“Shut the fuck up. Shut the fuck up, will you. I can’t tell you what’s wrong, because you wouldn’t understand what the hell I’m talking about.” Her tone is vicious and interspersed with gasping sobs.
“Try me. What is so difficult to understand?”
“I have never seen you cry as long as I’ve known you. Never. Matt left you and you didn’t shed a tear,” she seethes.
“Matt didn’t leave me.”
“He moved into a hotel, didn’t he? He never came back. And now he’s married to another woman.”
“You weren’t there... so how do you know that?”
“Someone informed me who was there when it happened.”
“I haven’t spoken to Chantal in years.”
“It wasn’t her.”
I turn away from her and gaze into the split bark. “They all talk, you know.”
“Gossip is not truth. No one knows what lies inside the heart of another human being.” The end of my sentence is drowned out by the sound of a large branch falling off the tree onto the hood of the car and the ping of apples dropping and rolling to the ground.
Through my open window, I hear the rustle of footsteps on dry grass.
“Ruth, darling, it’s not like you to make company with cow pies.” A man with a broad tanned face, spiky bleached hair, and sparkling green eyes peering out from skinny black frames, approaches from behind the car and looks in my window. “Everyone okay?” he asks in a voice coated in a creamy dark vibration.
Ruth’s head pops up from the steering wheel. “Georgie, what are you doing here?” she asks with a wide smile that reveals the bright pink gums above her front teeth.
“I’m on my way back from the meeting at Roger’s house. I’ve got my concert tonight on Mont Tremblant.”
He opens my door and lends an arm to help me out, and I see he wears neon green pants and his white cotton shirt smells like it has been dried on the line. Once he has helped me from the car, he walks around the tree and assists Ruth onto the grass.
The House on Black Lake Page 8