~ * ~
Sam Goodlow was aware only that he was in a car on a narrow country road, and that the car was moving much too slowly.
~ * ~
This is what the cop saw: an ancient Ford station wagon in mint condition; a driver and passenger (who was sitting very stiffly in the wagon's third seat); a long line of cars, baring angry drivers, behind the wagon.
The cop waited for the last car to pass, pulled out, and rode the narrow, sloping shoulder until he was to the right of the Woody. He honked his horn. Ryerson appeared to pay no attention. He turned on his siren. Still, Ryerson appeared to pay no attention.
The cop swore under his breath and pulled in front of the Woody, but—not wanting to be rear-ended—did not stop.
Cop, Ryerson thought.
Stupid son of a bitch! thought the cop.
Angry cop, Ryerson thought.
"He's pulling us over," said Sam Goodlow from the third seat.
Ryerson snapped his gaze to the rearview mirror. He saw the same bizarre face there that he had seen looking up at him from his desk chair and he screamed again, swerved the car into the left lane, lurched back, and jammed his foot into the brake pedal. The Woody—its brakes kept in good repair—stopped almost at once.
The angry driver just behind Ryerson, who had been following at half a car-length, slammed into the rear end of the Woody. The other cars, following at more prudent distances, stopped in time.
The cop kept going for several seconds, unaware of what was happening behind him.
"Dammit!" Ryerson whispered.
"Sorry," said Sam Goodlow.
The cop looked in his rearview mirror, saw what had happened, cursed again, stopped, backed up.
"Dammit, I can see through your head," Ryerson said to Sam Goodlow.
"I don't understand," Sam said.
"Your brains, dammit, and your—What are those?— your sinus cavities, your damned sinus cavities. And your optic nerves—"
"You're kidding."
Ryerson heard a loud knock at his window. He ignored it. He said to Sam Goodlow, "It's why I screamed. I'm not used to seeing people the way I'm seeing you."
"Roll down the window," said the cop.
"What do they look like?" Sam asked. "My brains, I mean. Are they like fat worms?"
The cop tapped harder on the window.
"Can't you see them for yourself?" Ryerson asked. "Look in the mirror."
Sam shook his head. "It's not the same. When I look in the mirror I . . . it makes me cringe. I don't see any brains, like you do."
"Open the goddamned window," the cop demanded, "or I'll break it open!"
Creosote, sitting primly in the toddler's car seat, wheezed and whimpered.
Ryerson sighed, turned to the face of the cop, which was all but smashed into the glass, and rolled the window down.
The cop snarled, "What in the name of all that's holy are you doing, mister? You drive like you're a hundred years old!" He looked toward the back of the Woody. His snarl trooped. "And where the hell is your passenger?"
Ryerson looked into the backseat. Sam Goodlow's eyes and mouth and brains and sinus cavities looked back.
Ryerson cringed and looked at the cop. "No passenger," he said.
Creosote gurgled—his wheezy approximation of a growl.
"The hell you say," the cop snarled, and walked to where he could see more clearly into the third seat. He leaned over, put his face against the glass, saw nothing. He came back to Ryerson's window and asked for Ryerson's license and registration, which Ryerson produced quickly, having been asked for those items more than once in his driving career.
~ * ~
At that moment, two twelve-year-old boys were walking in a densely wooded area twenty miles west of Boston when they came upon a strange mound of earth that looked as if it had been recently put there.
"I'll betcha someone's buried in it!" offered one of the boys.
"Naw," said the other boy. "It's just a termite mound. I seen them on TV, and they look like that."
"You think so?" said the first boy, clearly disappointed.
The second boy shrugged. "We could dig it up and find out."
The first boy wasn't sure about this idea. If the mound was indeed a burial mound, then when they dug in it, they'd find someone's body, and he didn't know how he'd react to that. He might drop over dead, or he might faint, and that would be really embarrassing. If the mound was a termite mound, then when they dug in it, they'd get termites all over them, and who knew what termites would do to his skin, considering what they did to wood. He said, "I don't know," in the bored way that boys say it to get other boys onto different pursuits.
But the second boy was intrigued. "I'll bet you think the termites are gonna bitecha!" He shook his head solemnly. "They don't bite."
Both boys had walking sticks in hand. The second boy stepped forward and poked at the mound. The walking stick sank easily into the soft dirt, and the boy withdrew it. He studied the end of the stick and scowled, confused.
The first boy looked at the end of the stick, too.
The second boy shrugged. "Wet," he said.
"Well, it rained last night," the first boy said.
"Yeah," said the second boy. He studied the wet dirt on the end of the stick a moment longer, and then, on impulse, ran to the top of the three-foot-high mound and jumped up and down on it.
~ * ~
In the third seat of Ryerson's Woody Wagon, Sam Goodlow shivered. "Christ, what was that?" he whispered.
Ryerson, while waiting for the cop to issue him a ticket charging him with improper speed and unsafe lane changes, was getting a lecture—about the dangers of driving too slowly—from the driver who had been following at half a car length and had rear-ended him.
Ryerson glanced into the rearview mirror and said, "Problem?"
The driver at his open window said, "Problem? Problem? Dammit, but you've got big brass balls, mister!"
Sam nodded grimly at Ryerson and said, "Someone just danced on my grave."
THIRTEEN
So this is how I'm going to die! Guy Squires thought, awestruck. Starved to death by a demon-woman who reads bad novels aloud endlessly.
The brunette was smiling coyly at him as she read, as if she were bringing him some secret pleasure. Her eyes, which were once again dark and beguiling, did not move from him to the page she was reading, and Guy Squires supposed that she had read this particular bad novel so many times she'd memorized it.
"'His death screams were like gunshots in a closed cylinder,'" she read. "'And the vampire's fangs, as big as walruses, bit into him and made his flesh into cheese.'"
Guy Squires thought many things about her as she read. He thought that she had acquired strength that did not show in her slim body. Perhaps she knew martial arts, which was how she had kept him from overpowering her and leaving this awful place, with its grimy windows and bare floors and velvet wallpaper, and its stale nearly unbreathable air.
And he thought that she was something of a hypnotist, as well, or, at least, that she had the awful power to make him see what was not there, because it was clear that she could not have become the demon that she had seemed to become. Such things simply were not possible.
She sat cross-legged on the bare floor between him and the door as she read. "'And as his skin became food for the dead, and the flesh of his bones, too, and then the bones, which were sticking out all over his dying body like twigs on an old tree, a tree that was dying, if not dead—'"
Guy Squires had thought of lunging for one of the tall windows just behind him. It was a three story drop, but he could survive it if he fell correctly. If he didn't hit head-first or fall backwards. Hit with his feet and roll. It was the way that paratroopers learned to fall. Hit and roll.
And probably break his goddamned skull, he decided.
Which would, at the last, be preferable to what was probably going to happen to him if he stayed here.
"'And there were o
ther vampires, too,'" the brunette read. "'And they were big as blimps, big as dirigibles, which floated at the horizon like lacy clouds making time for rain, which tickled the far horizon like tiny fingers.'"
~ * ~
Jack Lutz said testily, "You told me you'd only be an hour, Mr. Biergarten. It's been almost two hours."
He and Ryerson were just outside Lutz's front door, and were about to walk to the cabin where Stevie Lutz had disappeared.
Ryerson, who was holding Creosote in his arms, began, "I'm sorry," and went on to tell Lutz about the accident, and the ticket; at last, he pointed at the rear end of the Woody and concluded proudly, "There wasn't much damage to my car. She's quite a sturdy old thing. But the other car had to be towed away."
"Certainly," Lutz said, unimpressed, then, looking more closely at the Woody, which was a good one hundred feet away, said, "Is there someone in your car?"
"Do you see someone?" Ryerson asked, trying to sound neutral.
Lutz squinted at the car. He fished his glasses from his shirt pocket and put them on. At last, he shook his head. "I guess not."
Creosote gurgled, wheezed, snorted.
Lutz gave him a distasteful look. "Your little dog is sick or something, Mr. Biergarten. I'd see a veterinarian if I were you."
"Asthma," Ryerson explained. "It's a fault of the breed."
"Of course," Lutz said, again unimpressed.
Then he and Ryerson and Creosote started down the path which lead to the cabin.
Sam Goodlow lumbered behind them at a safe distance.
~ * ~
"What are you telling me, Mr. Biergarten?" Lutz said five minutes later. They had been walking quickly and were already halfway to the cabin. "Are you telling me you think that hunter's cabin is haunted?"
Ryerson grimaced. "I'm sorry." He scratched Creosote behind the ears because he sensed that the dog had an itch there. Creosote responded by giving him an almost obscenely loving look. "Haunted," Ryerson continued, "is a word I don't much like to use. Saying a place is haunted is like saying someone's crazy, don't you think? What does that mean—crazy? It could mean any of a number of things. It's more epithet than description. It's the same with ‘haunted'—it implies all kinds of nonsense, and I don't think I need to go into what sort of nonsense I'm talking about.
"What is important here, Mr. Lutz, is that your wife has apparently happened upon what might liberally be called a ’gateway.' It happens more often than anyone realizes, I think. These gateways apparently open at random and close at random; this is only a theory, of course. And I believe that they account for a good percentage of the hundreds of thousands of people who turn up missing every year.
"And I think that what is even more important as regards these gateways is that what ’haunts' us most, is, ultimately, ourselves, our pasts. The world of the hereafter, Mr. Lutz, is doubtless as complex and as-"
"Mr. Biergarten," Lutz cut in, "you sound like you're making a speech. I don't need speeches. I need to find my damned wife."
"Yes," Ryerson said, nonplussed. "I'll do my best."
Asshole! he heard from behind him. He glanced back and saw all the outsides and insides of Sam Goodlow, and Sam Goodlow's mouth grinning at him like the Cheshire cat.
~ * ~
Lutz refused, again, to go into the hunter's cabin. "I'll wait here, Mr. Biergarten, you just ..."—he fluttered his hand in the air to indicate the cabin—"... go in there and do whatever it is you do."
Ryerson glanced about. Sam Goodlow was nowhere to be seen.
"Are you listening to me?" Lutz asked.
Ryerson looked down at Lutz, who was squinting at him because the sun was in his eyes. "Do you hear what I'm saying?" Lutz asked.
"Yes, very clearly," Ryerson said. "If you could just watch my dog for a few minutes." He handed Creosote over; Lutz accepted the dog as if he were accepting a bag of manure.
Then Ryerson turned, and went into the cabin.
~ * ~
It was not as he remembered. There was no pervasive ocean smell. The floor was solid wood; the atmosphere was dry. A hole in the roof—he had not noticed the hole on his previous visit—let in a shaft of bright sunlight.
It was not the place he had visited only a couple of days earlier.
It had changed.
It was earthbound.
From a corner of the little building, Sam Goodlow said, “This is where the asshole's wife disappeared?"
Ryerson lurched upon hearing the voice.
"Sorry," Sam said, and his tone announced that he meant it.
Ryerson glanced quickly about the cabin, from corner to corner. He saw nothing. He said, "I can't see you."
"I can see you."
"Are you trying to hide, Mr. Goodlow?"
Silence.
"Mr. Goodlow?" Ryerson coaxed.
"It's Sam." A pause. "Sam," he repeated, and Ryerson toted a touch of what sounded like reverence in his tone when he said the name. He went on, "And no, I'm not trying to hide. At least, I don't believe I am."
Ryerson thought about this a moment. "Are you telling me that you can't control your appearances and disappearnces?"
"Apparently not."
"Apparently not what, Sam?" Ryerson asked. He heard sigh.
"Apparently," Sam explained, "I can't control my apiearances and disappearances. It takes a lot of effort simply to stay in one place, Mr. Biergarten."
"Call me Rye."
From outside, Lutz called, "I think your little dog has to pee. What should I do?"
"Just put him down. He'll stay close by."
Sam said, "Your dog loves you."
"My dog needs me," Ryerson corrected.
"Whatever passes best for love, he has in abstinence for you," Sam said.
"Abstinence?"
"Abstinence, penitence, abundance, what's the difference?"
Ryerson saw a form emerging in a corner. It was tall, and it was as thin as a water pipe.
"I don't know how I know that, Rye." He seemed confused. The tall thin form in the corner fattened, took the shape of a man. "I don't know how I know anything. It's very confusing being ... this way. Sometimes, often, in fact, I really don't know if I'm dead or alive. Now, at this moment, that is not so. How could it be so, and me like this?"
Ryerson said, "That is doubtless the same sort of confusion I think we all feel when we are thrust from the womb and into this world."
Silence.
Ryerson felt embarrassed; he wasn't sure why.
He heard a woman's voice. It came from the same corner that Sam's voice had come from. It said, "Don't philosophize about things you've never experienced, Mr. Biergarten."
The mannish form in the corner had not changed. It was tall, stocky, indistinct, but it was much the same form he had come to associate with Sam Goodlow. Ryerson said, "And who are you?"
"What do you mean?"—the woman's voice. "Who am I?"—Sam's voice. "I'm Sam Goodlow. Sam. Spam. Sam."
"I heard a woman talking," Ryerson said. He hesitated. "You were talking in a woman's voice."
"I was?" He paused. "I don't think I was." Another pause. "Who can hear his own voice, really, Mr. Biergarten?"
From outside, Lutz called, "Your little dog ran off. I can't see him anywhere."
"Shit!" Ryerson whispered. He quickly left the cabin and called to Creosote several times, waited, called again. At last, the dog came running from around the far side of the leaped into Ryerson's arms, and smothered him with licks and snuggles, while Lutz—obviously offended—looked on.
"Where have you been, little guy?" Ryerson asked. "You act like you haven't seen me for months?"
But Creosote wasn't talking.
Ryerson said, while Creosote snuggled against the under-side of his chin, "I'm sorry, Mr. Lutz, but I don't think there's anything I can do here today. This place simply doesn't ... speak to me anymore. Whatever was here has gone somewhere else."
Lutz pursed his lips. "You sound like a damned fortuneteller now."
/>
"No, Mr. Lutz"—Ryerson could feel his anger mount-ing; Lutz had rubbed him the wrong way since their first conversation—"I never claimed to be a fortune-teller. I will continue to do what I can for you, but this place is dead for ate, at the moment, and while I know that you are probably skeptical—"
"Yes, yes," Lutz broke in, "well I think that I'm going to be charged in Stevie's disappearance, anyway. So all of this is rather moot, wouldn't you say?" He gave Ryerson a lopsided grin.
"No," Ryerson began, "I wouldn't say it's moot—"
But Lutz turned from him and started for the path that would lead him back to the house.
"A troubled man," Ryerson whispered to Creosote, and followed Lutz.
The tall, mannish form in a corner of the cabin stayed where it was. For the moment, it could do nothing else. It was stuck.
~ * ~
The woman who called herself Violet McCartle looked expectantly at the big man as he came into the living room. "Well?" she said.
The big man said nothing. He sat in a fragile-looking straight-backed chair near her, leaned forward, and looked troubled.
Violet McCartle pressed, "Did you do what I asked you to do, dammit?"
The big man shrugged. "I've started to."
"You've started to? What in the hell does that mean? If you started to do it, why in the hell didn't you finish?"
The big man sighed. His face grew pale. "You haven't been up there lately, have you?"
"I've never been up there, actually, and I don't plan to go up there, either. But I fail to see how that's germane. How can you expect me to do the kinds of things that you do? We are equipped, you and I, to do very different kinds of things, and if I must be brutally frank—"
"Jesus," he interrupted, "it's just awful up there. I mean. . ." He looked as if he were going to throw up. "It's not just . . . it. If that were the case, then maybe I could do what you want me to do without any problem. But it isn't, it's—"
"Either you do what I've told you to do or your employment with me will cease. And you know what that means, right?"
He sighed. "Yes. I know what that means."
"Then we'll have no more discussion of this matter. You'll do as I've asked, and that will be that."
The big man said nothing. He was remembering what she had said only moments earlier: "I've never been up there, actually, and I don't plan to go up there, either."
Goodlow's Ghosts Page 7