Haunts

by Stephen Jones

  “Well, I’ll maintain scientific neutrality. While I consider poltergeists improbable, I’ll accept the improbable when the probable explanations have all been eliminated.”

  “Nicely phrased, Holmes,” Stryker chuckled. “And taking a position that will have you coming out sounding correct no matter what.”

  “The secret of medical training.”

  “I knew you’d come in handy for something.”

  “Well, then, what’s your opinion?”

  The author decided it was safe to release the dashboard and light his pipe. “Well, I guess I’ve used the supernatural too often in my fiction to accept it as willingly as I might otherwise. Seems every time I start gathering the facts on something like this, I find myself studying it as a fiction plot. You know—like those yarns I used to crank out for pulps like Dime Mystery Stories, where when you get to the end you learn that the Phantom of Ghastly Manor was really Cousin Rodney dressed up in a monster suit so he could murder Uncle Ethelred and claim the inheritance before the will was changed. Something like that. I start putting facts together like I was plotting a murder thriller, you know. Kind of spoils the effect for me. This thing, for instance ..

  Russ cursed and braked viciously to avoid the traffic stopped ahead at Malfunction Junction. Knoxville’s infamous rush hour tangle had the interstate blocked solid ahead of them. Swerving onto the shoulder, he darted for the upcoming exit and turned towards the University section. Curtiss seemed about to bite his pipe in two.

  “Stop off at the Yardarm? I don’t want to fight this traffic.”

  Stryker thought he could use a drink.

  *

  Safely seated in a back booth, stein of draft in hand, Curtiss regained his color. It was a favorite bar—just off the Strip section of the University area. When Stryker had first come to the area years back, it had been a traditional Rathskeller college bar. Styles had changed, and so had students. Long hair had replaced crew cuts, Zen and revolution had shoved fraternities and football from conversational standards, and there was a faint hint of marijuana discernible through the beer smell. Someone had once suggested changing the name of the Yardarm to the Electric Foreskin or some such, and had been tossed out for his own good.

  Stryker didn’t care. He’d been coming here for years—sometimes having a round with his creative writing students. Now—well, if they wanted to talk football, he’d played some; if they wanted to talk revolution, he’d fought in some. The beer was good, and the atmosphere not too frantic for conversation.

  His office was a block or two away—an upstairs room in a ramshackle office building only slightly less disreputable in appearance than the dilapidated Edwardian mansion turned community clinic where Russ worked. This was several blocks in the other direction, so the bar made a convenient meeting place for them. Afternoons often found the pair talking over a pitcher of beer (Knoxville bars could not serve liquor at the time), and the bartender—a huge red-bearded Viking named Blackie—knew them both by name.

  “You were saying that your faith in the supernatural was fraught with skepticism,” Mandarin reminded, wiping foam from his mustache.

  “No. I said it was tempered with rationality,” Stryker hedged. “That doesn’t mean I don’t believe in the supernatural. It means I examine facts with several of those famous grains of salt before I offer them to my readers.”

  “I take it then you’re going to use this business today in your new book.”

  Stryker nodded enthusiastically. “It’s worth a chapter, I’m certain.”

  “Well, that’s your judgement, of course,” commented Mandarin, glancing at his watch. “Personally, I didn’t read any irrefutable evidence of the supernatural into all this.”

  “Science scoffing under the shadow of truths inadmissible to its system of logic.” Stryker snorted. “You’re as blind in your beliefs as the old-guard priesthood holding the bastions of disease-by-wrath-of-God against the germ-theory heretics.”

  “I suppose,” Russ admitted around a belch.

  “But then, I forgot that you were back in Libby’s room while I was finishing up the interview with Gayle Corrington,” Stryker said suddenly. “Hell, you missed out on what I considered the most significant and intriguing part of her story. Let me read this off to you.” He fumbled for his notepad.

  Mandarin had had enough of hauntings for the day. “Let me have you fill me in later,” he begged off. “I’ve got an evening clinic tonight, and I’d like to run back to the house beforehand and get packed.”

  “Going out of town?”

  “I need to see my high-priced lawyers in New York tomorrow.”

  “That’s right. How’s that look?”

  Russ frowned, said with more confidence than he felt: “I think we’ll make our case. Police just can’t burglarize a physician’s confidential files in order to get evidence for a drug bust.”

  “Well, I wish you luck,” Stryker allowed. “There’s a few angles I want to check out on this business first, anyway. I’ll probably have the chapter roughed out by the time you’re back in town. Why don’t I give you a carbon then, and let you comment?”

  “Fine.” Russ stood up and downed his beer. “Can I give you a lift somewhere?”

  “Thanks—but I’ve got my car parked just down the block. You take it easy driving back though.”

  Russ grinned. “Sure. Take it easy yourself.”

  *

  Two nights later Mandarin’s phone woke him up. Stryker hadn’t taken it easy.

  *

  IV

  Disheveled and coatless in the misty rain, Mandarin stood glumly beside the broken guardrail. It was past 3:00 a.m. His clothes looked slept in, which they were. He’d continued the cocktail hour that began on his evening flight from New York once he got home. Sometime towards the end of the network movie that he wasn’t really watching, he fell asleep on the couch. The set was blank and hissing when he stumbled awake to answer the phone.

  “Hello, Russ,” greeted Saunders, puffing up the steep bank from the black lakeshore. His face was grim. “Thought you ought to be called. You’re about as close to him as anyone Stryker had here.”

  Mandarin swallowed and nodded thanks. With the back of his hand he wiped the beads of mist and sweat from his face. Below them the wrecker crew and police diver worked to secure cables to the big maroon Buick submerged there. Spotlights, red taillights burning through the mist. Yellow beacon on the wrecker, blue flashers on the two patrol cars. It washed the brush-grown lakeshore with a flickering nightmarish glow. Contorted shadows wavered around objects made grotesque, unreal. It was like a Daliesque landscape.

  “What happened, Ed?” he managed to say.

  The police lieutenant wiped mud from his hands. “Nobody saw it. No houses along this stretch, not a lot of traffic this hour of night.”

  An ambulance drove up slowly, siren off. Static outbursts of the two-way radios echoed like sick thunder in the silence.

  “Couple of kids parked on a side road down by the lake. Thought they heard brakes squeal, then a sort of crashing noise. Not loud enough to make them stop what they were doing, and they’d been hearing cars drive by fast off and on all night. But they remembered it a little later when they drove past here and saw the gap in the guardrail.”

  He indicated the snapped-off stumps of the old-style wood post and cable guardrail. “Saw where the brush was smashed down along the bank and called it in. Investigating officer’s flashlight picked out the rear end plain enough to make out the license number. I was on hand when owner’s identification came in; had you called.”

  Russ muttered something. He’d met Saunders a few years before when the lieutenant was taking Styker’s evening class in creative writing. The detective had remained a casual friend despite Mandarin’s recent confrontations with the department.

  “Any chance Curtiss might have made it?”

  Saunders shook his head. “Been better than a couple hours since it happened. If he’d gotten out,
he’d have hiked it to a house down the road, flagged down a motorist. We’d have heard.”

  Someone called out from the shore below, and the wrecker’s winch began to rattle. Russ shivered.

  “Rained a little earlier tonight,” Saunders went on. “Enough to make this old blacktop slick as greased glass. Likely, Curtiss had been visiting some friends. Had maybe a few drinks more than he should have—you know how he liked gin in hot weather. Misjudged his speed on these slippery curves and piled on over into the lake.”

  “Hell, Curtiss could hold his liquor,” Mandarin mumbled. “And he hardly ever pushed that big Buick over 35.”

  “Sometimes that’s fast enough.”

  The Buick’s back end broke through the lake’s black surface like a monster in a Japanese horror flick. With an obscene gurgle, the rest of the car followed. Lake water gushed from the car body and from the open door on the passenger side.

  “Okay! Hold it!” someone yelled.

  The maroon sedan halted, drowned and streaming, on the brush-covered shore. Workers grouped around it. Two attendants unlimbered a stretcher from the ambulance. Russ wanted to vomit.

  “Not inside!” a patrolman called up to them.

  The diver pushed back his face mask. “Didn’t see him in there before we started hauling either.”

  “Take another look around where he went in,” Saunders advised. “Someone call in and have the Rescue Squad ready to start dragging at daylight.”

  “He never would wear his seat belt,” Russ muttered.

  Saunders’s beefy frame shrugged heavily. “Don’t guess it would have helped this time. Lake’s deep here along the bluff. May have to wait till the body floats up somewhere.” He set his jaw so tight his teeth grated. “Goddamn it to hell.”

  “We don’t know he’s dead for sure.” Russ’s voice held faint hope.

  Sloshing and clanking, the Buick floundered up the lakeshore and onto the narrow blacktop. The door was sprung open, evidently by the impact. The front end was badly mauled—grille smashed and hood buckled—from collision with the guardrail and underbrush. Several branches were jammed into the mangled wreckage. A spiderweb spread in an ominous pattern across the windshield on the driver’s side.

  Russ glowered at the sodden wreck, silently damning it for murdering its driver. Curtiss had always sworn by Buicks—had driven them all his life. Trusted the car. And the wallowing juggernaut had plunged into Fort Loundon Lake like a chrome-trimmed coffin.

  Saunders tried the door on the driver’s side. It was jammed. Deep gouges scored the sheet metal on that side.

  “What’s the white paint?” Mandarin pointed to the crumpled side panels.

  “From the guardrail. He glanced along that post there as he tore through. Goddamn it! Why can’t they put up modern guardrails along these back roads! This didn’t have to happen!”

  Death is like that, Russ thought. It never had to happen the way it did. You could always go back over the chain of circumstances leading up to an accident, find so many places where things could have turned out okay. Seemed like the odds were tremendous against everything falling in place for the worst.

  “Maybe he got out,” he whispered.

  Saunders started to reply, looked at his face, kept silent.

  *

  V

  It missed the morning papers, but the afternoon News-Sentinel carried Stryker’s book-jacket portrait and a few paragraphs on page one, a photograph of the wreck and a short continuation of the story on the back page of the first section. And there was a long notice on the obituary page.

  Russ grinned crookedly and swallowed the rest of his drink. Mechanically he groped for the Jack Daniel’s bottle and poured another over the remains of his ice cubes. God. Half-a-dozen errors in the obituary. A man gives his whole life to writing, and the day of his death they can’t even get their information straight on his major books.

  The phone was ringing again. Expressionlessly Mandarin caught up the receiver. The first score or so times he’d still hoped he’d hear Curtiss’s voice—probably growling something like: “The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” Eventually he’d quit hoping.

  “Yes. Dr Mandarin speaking.”

  (Curtiss had always ribbed him. “Hell, don’t tell them who you are until they tell you who’s calling.”)

  “No. They haven’t found him yet.”

  (“Hot as it is, he’ll bob up before long,” one of the workers had commented. Saunders had had to keep Russ off the bastard.)

  “Yeah. It’s a damn dirty shame. I know how you feel, Mrs. Hollister.”

  (You always called him a hack behind his back, you bloated bitch.)

  “No I can’t say what funeral arrangements will be made.”

  (Got to have a body for a funeral, you stupid bitch.)

  “I’m sure someone will decide something.”

  (Don’t want to be left out of the social event of the season, do you?)

  “Well, we all have to bear up somehow, I’m sure.”

  (Try cutting your wrists.)

  “Uh-huh. Goodbye, Mrs. Hollister.”

  Jesus! Mandarin pushed the phone aside and downed his drink with a shudder. No more of this!

  He groped his way out of his office. That morning he’d canceled all his appointments; his section of the makeshift clinic was deserted. Faces from the downstairs rooms glanced at him uneasily as he swept down the stairs. Yes, he must look pretty bad.

  Summer twilight was cooling the grey pavement furnace of the University section. Russ tugged off his wrinkled necktie, stuffed it into his hip pocket. With the determined stride of someone in a hurry to get someplace, he plodded down the cracked sidewalk. Sweat quickly sheened his blue-black stubbled jaw, beaded his forehead and eyebrows. Damp hair ciung to his neck and ears. Dimly he regretted that the crew cut of his college days was no longer fashionable.

  Despite his unswerving stride, he had no destination in mind. The ramshackle front of the Yardarm suddenly loomed before him, made him aware of his surroundings. Mandarin paused a moment by the doorway. Subconsciously he’d been thinking how good a cold beer would taste, and his feet had carried him over the familiar route. With a grimace, he turned away. Too many memories haunted the Yardarm.

  He walked on. He was on the Strip now. Student bars, bookshops, drugstores, clothing shops, and other student-oriented businesses. Garish head shops and boutiques poured out echoes of incense and rock music. Gayle Corrington owned a boutique along here, he recalled—he dully wondered which one.

  Summer students and others of the University crowd passed along the sidewalks, lounged in doorways. Occasionally someone recognized him and called a greeting. Russ returned a dumb nod, not wavering in his mechanical stride. He didn’t see their faces.

  Then someone had hold of his arm.

  “Russ! Russ, for God’s sake! Hold up!”

  Scowling, he spun around. The smooth-skinned hand anchored to his elbow belonged to Royce Blaine. Mandarin made his face polite as he recognized him. Dr. Blaine had been on the medicine house staff during Mandarin’s psychiatric residency. Their acquaintance had not died out completely since those days.

  “Hello, Royce.”

  The internist’s solemn eyes searched his face. “Sorry to bother you at a time like now, Russ,” he apologized. “Just wanted to tell you we were sad to hear about your friend Stryker. Know how good a friend of yours he was.”

  Mandarin mumbled something appropriate.

  “Funeral arrangements made yet, or are they still looking?”

  “Haven’t found him yet.”

  His face must have slipped its polite mask. Blaine winced.

  “Yeah? Well, just wanted to let you know we were all sorry. He was working on a new one, wasn’t he?”

  “Right. Another book on the occult.”

  “Always thought it was tragic when an author left his last book unfinished. Was it as good as his others?”

  “I hadn’t seen any of it. I b
elieve all he had were notes and a few chapters rough.”

  “Really a damn shame. Say, Russ—Tina says for me to ask you how about dropping out our way for dinner some night. We don’t see much of you these days—not since you and Alicia used to come out for fish fries.”

  “I’ll take you up on that some night,” Russ temporized.

  “This week maybe?” Blaine persisted. “How about Friday?”

  “Sure. That’d be fine.”

  “Friday, then. 6:30, say. Time for a happy hour.”

  Mandarin nodded and smiled thinly. Blaine squeezed his shoulder, gave him a sympathetic face, and scurried off down the sidewalk. Mandarin resumed his walk.

  The hot afternoon sun was in decline, throwing long shadows past the mismatched storefronts and deteriorating houses. Russ was dimly aware that his feet were carrying him along the familiar path to Stryker’s office. Did he want to walk past there? Probably not—but he felt too apathetic to redirect his course.

  The sun was behind the old drugstore whose second floor housed a number of small businesses, and the dirty windows of Stryker’s office lay in shadow. Behind their uncurtained panes, a light was burning.

  Mandarin frowned uncertainly. Curtiss never left his lights on. He had an obsession about wasting electricity.

  Leaning heavily on the weathered railing, Russ climbed the outside stairway that gave access to the second floor. Above, a dusty hallway led down the center of the building. Several doorways opened off either side. A tailor, a leather shop, several student-owned businesses—which might or might not reopen with the fall term. Only Frank the Tailor was open for the summer, and he took Mondays off.

  Dust and silence and the stale smell of disused rooms. Stryker’s office was one of the two which fronted the street. It was silent as the rest of the hallway of locked doors, but light leaked through the not-quite-closed doorway.

  Mandarin started to knock, then noticed the scars on the doorjamb where the lock had been forced. His descending fist shoved the door open.

  Curtiss’s chair was empty. No one sat behind the scarred desk with its battered typewriter.