He opened the door. It was Eleanor Shine. Her hair was tightly braided so that she looked like a princess from a medieval storybook, and she was wearing a black satin dress, very short, and black suede pixie boots. She was wearing that vertigo perfume again.
‘I promised I’d call,’ she announced.
‘Oh, sure. Come on in.’ What else could he say? She had told him that she was always late, hadn’t she? But twenty-four hours late … that was late, no question about it.
‘Mind the—’ he said, after she had tripped on Vinnie’s uncle’s shoe mountain.
‘My God. Who do you share with? Imelda Marcos?’
‘No, no – these belong to the owner. The late, deceased owner.’
‘Mr Boschetto, yes. Very nice man, from what I saw of him. Always beautifully dressed. Always polite. Lifted his hat, opened the elevator door for me, said “buena sera, signora,” and all that. But he always kept himself to himself. Hardly ever came to co-op meetings, and when he did he never spoke.’
She strode long-legged into the center of the living room. ‘This is amazing. I was never in here before. My heavens – that must be the original wallpaper, is it? And these photographs! Amazing! What is this one?’
Jim went over and took a look. ‘A woman in an Amish costume, on stilts.’
‘Yes, but the stilts are on fire!’
‘Yes, so they are. What does it say? Religious observance, Pennsylvania, 1937.’
‘But what do you think happened to her? It’s dreadful! Everybody’s just standing around, staring at the camera! Do you think anybody saved her?’
Jim shook his head. ‘Most of the pictures in here are like that. Kind of … you know … disturbing. Look at this one.’
Eleanor peered at a tiny photograph of a small girl with bunches and a grubby face. She couldn’t have been more than four years old, but she was holding a huge nickel-plated .44 to her left temple. The caption read: Monica, Russian Roulette, Arkansas, 1924.
‘It’s awful,’ said Eleanor. ‘Do you know who took them? It wasn’t Mr Boschetto, was it? I always thought he was such a gentleman! I mean, these are quite perverted, aren’t they? I don’t mean sexually perverted, but …’ She stopped. She had caught sight of the painting above the fireplace. ‘You put it back up! I thought you were going to hide it away!’
‘I … ah … I thought I might as well re-hang it. You know, so that you could see it better. Would you like a glass of wine?’
She turned to him. Her eyes were extraordinary, as if they were specially made out of green and white glass. It was a long time since he had met a woman whose sexuality was so tangible. She seemed to be charged with static electricity, as if she would make angora sweaters rise like thistledown, and make iron filings swirl into patterns, and actually crackle if you touched her.
‘A glass of wine? Yes, why not?’
He went into the kitchen and she followed him. ‘You’ve been cooking. I didn’t interrupt your supper, did I?’
‘No, I – lost my appetite, kind of.’
‘You’re worried about something.’
He took the bottle of Chardonnay out of the fridge and peeled off the foil around the neck. ‘I’m … I’ve had a difficult couple of years, that’s all. Let’s just say that I have a tendency to attract trouble.’
Tibbles was still under the sink. She looked up at Eleanor and mewed.
‘That’s your cat? She can’t stay here, you know. The board is very Hitlerian about animals.’
‘Well, I’m sure that we can work something out.’
Eleanor hunkered down and made cheeping noises. ‘Here, puss! Puss-puss-puss! What happened to you, puss? You look like you’ve been sitting too close to the fire!’
‘That’s one of the things I wanted to talk to you about,’ said Jim. ‘It happened last night, directly after we’d moved in. I heard her yowling, so I went into the living room, and there she was – perched right on top of a torchère, smoking.’
‘Oh, no!’ said Eleanor. ‘Is she badly hurt? Poor pussycat! Look at her fur! Do you know, my rabbit-skin coat looked like that, after the moths got to it! Well, that’s when I used to wear fur. Just think of all the rabbits who are hopping about today, happy and free, because I won’t wear their skin any more!’
‘Yes,’ said Jim, trying to think about something else altogether.
Eleanor stroked Tibbles under the chin, which she could never resist. ‘Poor pussycat! How did it happen?’
‘I don’t have the first idea. There were no candles in the room, no bare wires. The fire wasn’t lit.’
Eleanor gave Tibbles one more stroke and then she stood up. ‘Do you think the painting could have had anything to do with it?’ Her tone of voice was not only serious, but demanding, as if he was obliged to answer her, by law.
‘I can’t understand how. But the way that Tibbles was looking at it, you’d have thought that she blamed it for setting her alight. She hid under the couch for a while and she wouldn’t come out. I mean, she was very, very scared, and however she got burned, it was the painting she was scared of – no doubt about it.’
‘Does it scare you?’
‘Well … not really. But like you said yesterday, it does have a certain … I don’t know …’ He flapped his hand, trying to think of the right word.
‘Power?’ said Eleanor.
‘I don’t exactly know if I’d call it power. In my experience, some objects appear to have a power of their own, when they don’t, really. Not in themselves. It’s only the way they make people feel. Voodoo masks, witch doctors’ bones, crucifixes, things like that. They strike certain primitive chords.
Eleanor was staring at him.
‘What?’ he asked her.
She came closer, still staring at him. He wondered if he had a zit on his nose.
‘You can see, can’t you?’ she asked him.
He knew what she meant, but he pretended he didn’t. Over the years, his sight had caused him so much pain, and so much fear, and so much heartache. He wished more than anything else that he could be blind to the afterlife, so that when he walked along the street he couldn’t see the dead any more, or the hideous things that crawled out of the human imagination, like boogie men, and ghosts, and creatures that hid beneath the bed, waiting to bite at children’s ankles. Because they were really there, to those who could see them.
‘Let’s go through,’ he suggested, and led the way back into the living room. But Eleanor refused to be put off.
‘You can see,’ she insisted.
‘All right,’ he confessed. ‘I can see. How can you tell?’
‘Because I’m sensitive myself, that’s why.’
‘Oh, yes?’
‘I’ve been sensitive ever since I was a little girl. I can’t actually see spirits, not the way that you can, but I can tell when they’re close by, and I can usually tell what they’re thinking, especially if they’re unhappy.’
Jim took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. In the past five or six years he had come across dozens of psychics and so-called ‘sensitives,’ but only one or two of them had proved themselves to be halfway genuine. The rest had been fruitcakes or dangerous frauds.
He liked Eleanor. He thought she was the kind of woman who could easily help him to get over Karen. Sexy, smart, elegant, eccentric. But if she was going to make out that she was a sensitive, that could give present a serious problem, especially if she was a fake.
‘Why don’t you sit down?’ he asked her.
Eleanor looked around. ‘I can sense a presence in this apartment. Here and now.’
‘Really?’
She frowned, and cupped one hand around her ear, listening. ‘Two presences, in fact. Well, more than two – many more – but two that are really important.’
She plonked herself down on the couch, very abruptly, as if she were playing a game of musical chairs. Her dress was really very short.
‘You don’t believe me, do you?’ she demanded.
&nbs
p; ‘I didn’t say that.’
‘No, but you were thinking it,’ said Eleanor. ‘But answer me this: if I don’t have the gift, how could I possibly know that you can see?’
‘How should I know? Maybe Vinnie told you. Most of my friends know about it. Some of my students used to know about it, too. It isn’t that easy to hide.’
‘I’ve never even met Vinnie. Who’s Vinnie?’
‘Mr Boschetto’s nephew. He inherited this apartment. Well, along with two of his sisters.’
‘Jim, I’m telling you the truth. I can feel two strong presences here, but they’re keeping themselves very well hidden, because they’re worried that you’ll see them – and that you’ll want to talk to them, and that you’ll find out what they’re doing.’
‘So who are they? And what are they doing?’
Eleanor put down her glass of wine on the side table and pressed her fingertips to her forehead. Jim noticed for the first time that, deep between her breasts, she was wearing a large silver pendant. It was emblazoned with a bland, round face, rather like the face of the moon in medieval paintings. It was the face of a fool, but a sly, cruel fool.
Eleanor closed her eyes and tilted her head back. Jim waited patiently, occasionally glancing around the room to see if there was any visible sign of her ‘presences’. The Italian clock ticked away each minute as if it could barely summon up the energy. Eleanor’s lips were moving slightly, but Jim couldn’t hear what she was saying. He was tempted to look up at Robert H. Vane, but he found the strength of will not to. He wasn’t going to allow a nineteenth-century daguerrotypist with a cloth over his head to win a ‘made-you-look’ contest.
He was just about to pick up his glass of wine when Eleanor clutched at his wrist and almost broke his watch strap.
‘They’re good spirits,’ she said hoarsely. ‘They’re very good spirits. I can feel their goodness.’
‘Where are they?’ Jim asked her.
Silence.
‘Eleanor, where are they?’
‘He came …’ she continued. ‘There was something – something about a wedding. A wedding, that’s it! And he was there, but he wasn’t related – or a guest, or a friend of the family. He was all dressed in black … and she said—’
‘She? Who’s she?’
‘She said, “he looks like a mortician,” and she didn’t realize then how true her words were.’
Jim laid his hand on top of Eleanor’s. ‘Eleanor, can you hear me? Listen, Eleanor, I need to know who they are, these spirits. Ask them what their names are.’
‘They’re good spirits,’ Eleanor insisted. Her eyes were still closed and her fingertips were still pressed to her forehead. ‘They don’t wish you any harm. They keep asking you to forgive them. Please, forgive us! But somebody has to find him … Somebody has to stop him.’
‘Who, Eleanor? Who are they, and who’s him?’
‘He has to be found, Jim. It isn’t going to be easy. He can hide almost any place at all. But he has to be found, and he has to be killed. Otherwise …’
‘Otherwise what?’
‘Otherwise he’ll go on forever, and he’ll gather in more and more spirits like a rat-catcher. Innocent spirits, good spirits.’
‘For God’s sake, Eleanor, who?’
Eleanor didn’t answer, but began to breathe deeper and deeper, taking in huge lungfuls of air through her nose and exhaling them with a quivering gasp.
‘Eleanor. Eleanor! Listen to me! Snap out of it, OK?’
But Eleanor continued to hyperventilate, and her gasps grew more and more desperate, as if she were being gassed, or drowning.
‘Eleanor! Listen to me! Eleanor!’ Jim grasped her shoulders and shook her. ‘Eleanor! Open your eyes! Come on, Eleanor, come back to me! One … two … three!’
Her eyes remained closed, but her shoulders hunched and her arms and legs started to slacken, as if she were a marionette. It was then that Jim’s eye was caught by a flicker of movement on the opposite side of the room. A dark, dancing flicker against the drapes.
There was a pause, and then he saw it again. A tall, attenuated shadow, like the shadow of a man on a winter’s day – impossibly stretched-out, and out of proportion. It moved silently across the curtains with a long, giraffe-like lope, even though there was nobody between the table lamp and the window, and the curtains were far too thick for it to have been showing through from outside.
In a few seconds it had vanished, but Jim sat staring at the window bay for nearly half a minute afterward. He had never felt such dread in his life. It was the shadow’s way of walking that had frightened him so much – the fluid but wildly uneven gait of somebody who has learned to overcome a terrible disability. Maybe not somebody, but something – because it had seemed to Jim to be an assembly of human, animal and insect. It was the shadow of a creature that, seen in the flesh, would lead you straight to madness.
‘Eleanor!’
Eleanor stopped panting and opened her eyes. She blinked at Jim as if she had never seen him before.
‘Are you OK?’ he asked her.
‘Yes … I think so.’ She looked around the living room. ‘I talked to them. The presences. They were amazing.’
‘There was something else here, Eleanor. I saw it.’
‘My God, Jim. You’re shaking!’
‘For God’s sake! There was something else here! Not just your “presences.”’
She looked bewildered. ‘What was it? Was it a spirit? What did it look like? Where?’
‘A shadow. It walked across the drapes. But it wasn’t just a shadow. It was …’ He couldn’t find words to tell her how much it had frightened him. It was everything that comes after you in the middle of the night. Everything that limps and hobbles and hurries through the darkness, and eventually catches up with you, when you’re least expecting it.
Eleanor nodded. She looked even more serious than she had before.
‘You know what it was?’ Jim asked her.
‘I think so. I think it was him, Jim. The man you have to hunt down.’
Jim sat back. ‘Me? Why me? Forget it. Absolutely not.’
‘But who else could do it?’
‘I don’t know, Eleanor, and I truly don’t care. I’m not hunting anybody down, period. I’m out of this supernatural malarkey, for good and all, you got it? Let me tell you this: whatever it takes to stop me from seeing dead people, and demons, and boogie men and … and sinister shadows that hobble across my curtains – if I need therapy – if I need a lobotomy, even – then that’s what I’m going to do.’
Eight
Eleanor waited until he had finished. Then, very calmly, she said, ‘OK.’
‘OK what?’
‘OK, if you really don’t want to hunt this person down, then nobody can make you – least of all me.’
‘That’s OK, then,’ said Jim. He waited for Eleanor to say something else and when she didn’t, he stood up, went back into the kitchen, and took another can of beer out of the fridge. When he returned to the living room, Tibbles followed him in, and jumped up on his chair beside him.
‘Look at the state of this cat,’ he said. ‘She looks like a bomb went off in a toilet brush factory.’
‘Yes,’ said Eleanor. ‘But she’s the key to what’s happening here.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I don’t know, exactly … but the presences kept trying to make me look at her. Almost as if they were physically trying to turn my head around.’
‘So … these “presences”.’ Do they talk to you, or what?’
‘No, they don’t talk. It’s more like I feel them. It’s like being in a darkened room, with a whole lot of people you’ve never met before. You can only get to know them by touching them and smelling them. I can’t hear any actual words … I can only get the gist of what they’re trying to tell me.’
‘Do you know who they are … or who they were?’
‘No. They didn’t live here when they were alive. I’m pr
etty sure this apartment was familiar to them, but it wasn’t their home.’
‘Well, Vinnie’s uncle lived here for over forty years, almost as long as the building’s been standing. And he lived here alone, so far as I know. Well, he probably had his fancy women. Or men. I don’t know anything about him, except that he couldn’t bear to throw away his shoes.’
Eleanor stood up and paced slowly around the perimeter of the room, her eyes on the floor, as if she were looking for a lost earring. ‘They could have been related to Vinnie’s uncle. They were very passionate, very expressive. Very Latin, if you know what I mean.’
‘You don’t have any idea what their names were?’
Eleanor shook her head. ‘The woman may have been called something like Flora or Floretta. She gave me a feeling like lots of little multicolored flowers, but that could have been anything. A favorite dress, maybe. Even an apron. The man … I don’t know. I get the feeling that he might have had a moustache, that’s all.’
‘So who’s this person who scares them so much?’
‘Again, I don’t know his name. But the first time they saw him was at somebody’s wedding. A close relative, I think, maybe a niece or a nephew. The woman gave me a mental picture of the bride, and the groom, and I could hear accordion music, and people clapping. Then everybody gathered together to have their photograph taken, and it was then that this man appeared. He was all dressed in black, and for some reason the woman felt afraid of him. And I mean, deeply afraid.’
‘Was he the photographer?’
‘I’m not sure. That wasn’t very clear.’
‘Did you see him yourself?’
‘Through her eyes, briefly. He was very blurred.’
‘Would you know him again, if you saw his face?’
Eleanor stopped by his chair. The hem of her dress was lightly touching his arm, and he could smell that perfume again, as if she had lightly sprayed it on her inner thighs. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I think I might.’
He pointed to the painting. ‘Do you think it’s him? Robert H. Vane?’
Darkroom Page 9