He looked at her. “I think I’ll try calling again,” he said, smiling.
He saw her check the clock. It was 11: 15. “What time there? Eight-fifteen, seven-fifteen?”
Will slid out of bed. The air was cold and unfriendly. He went to his bureau and pulled out a pair of socks. He threw on his ratty robe that he just couldn’t part with. It was too warm and comfortable. Reassuring in a disposable world.
“It’s eight-fifteen there. I’ll just try one more time,” he said. “Then I’ll say the hell with it. Whalen can call me back if he wants to.”
Becca nodded. “It’s funny. He said he’d be in. That he wanted to talk with you.” Becca chewed her lip. “He sounded desperate.”
“Right,” Will said. And he went out the door and downstairs to his office. He threw on the living room light. The room looked startled by his intrusion.
He thought about getting a beer. But then he knew he’d be up half the night while his kidneys processed it.
He sat behind his desk and picked up the phone
He dialed Whalen’s number.
And he listened to it ring and ring.
Knowing that no one was going to answer.
And how do I know that? he wondered. What the hell makes me think that?
Because — because —
He remembered how Whalen sounded, so scared, obsessed with Jim Kiff. Whalen’s wires were frayed and ready to start a meltdown.
Though Will couldn’t imagine why.
The rain spat at the window in front of him.
He heard the leaves in the big maple outside the house rustle. The fall sound was punctuated by the steady ringing from the receiver held up to his ear, followed by silence, followed by ringing. Over and over.
Whalen kept something from me, Will thought.
There’s something that he knows . . . about Kiff, about — God knows what.
Will hung up the phone. He dialed again, the sound of the unanswered ring almost reassuring now.
The cat cried from the backyard. begging to be let in from the cold rain. Can’t do that, Will knew. The damn cat wakes us up at dawn, or even earlier. Mewling to get out or to be fed, or —
Dr. Joshua James looked at him.
Currently, the bio stated, Visiting Professor of Canonical Law at Fordham.
Will shook his head. He didn’t imagine that the Catholic hierarchy would let an ex-priest stay active in the family business.
Things change, Will guessed. Even in the old Roman Church.
Now he pulled the other book closer. The old book. And just moving it made the smell of the leather come to life. He felt the dry binding stick to his fingers, the leather decaying like ancient skin, lost to ravages of time and worms.
He looked at the title. Then he read it aloud, seeking reassurance in the goofy sound of it. “Experiments in Time,” Will read. “By T. W. Dunne.”
And he wondered — how did Kiff get this book? It had to be pretty damn rare. Unless Kiff had looked up old Mr. Scott and made an offer for the teacher’s copy.
Scott’s got to be dead, though.
Sure. Has to be . . .
Will opened it, thinking: It doesn’t sound like an occult book.
The paper was tissue thin, dense with words, enormous paragraphs. The language was scholarly, arcane, indecipherable.
Will read a paragraph at random.
The presence of physical manifestations only reinforces the concept that the material plane is both fluid and mutable, and the true nature of reality and time stands revealed only at their highest levels.
Fer shur, dude, Will thought.
He Hipped through the pages, past odd-sounding chapter headings, and diagrams that looked vaguely Egyptian, or Mayan, or —
He came to a loose piece of paper.
It was a single sheet of lined paper, with a drawing on it. A circle, a star inscribed. It was old. Not as old as the book, but the white lined paper was yellow with age, curled at the corners, with a tear growing through the middle.
I know what this is, Will thought.
God, this is the paper. The sheet that Kiff used to copy down the ceremony from Scott’s book.
Kiff kept it . . . all these years.
Will was reluctant to touch it, to pick it up.
But he did.
And suddenly that night, the sea, the young faces of his friends, the rocks, the very salt air, all of it seemed as if it happened only minutes ago . . . seconds.
He rubbed his chin.
The cat cried from the front door. And Will took a breath, startled.
In answer, the wind pressed against the windows of his office, demanding entry.
Holding the paper up to the light, Will saw something on the back, something on the other side.
It was a drawing of a cross, filling the whole page. And at the top, in small, tiny letters barely visible to the naked eye, were three words.
God help us.
The inside of the cross was filled with those words, line after line, every bit of space. The minuscule letters were all jumbled together until the cross was black with those words.
God help us.
A hundred times. A thousand times.
God help us.
A branch scratched at the window. Will looked up. The wind was picking up.
Picking up.
He grabbed up the phone and dialed again.
“Come on,” he said. “Answer the goddamn phone.”
It was 11:31. The phone rang and rang.
Will stuck the piece of paper back inside the book.
Then he slapped the book shut, still holding the receiver to his ear.
When he thought he heard someone pick up the phone.
The ringing stopped.
Yes, he thought. Whalen picked up.
Someone’s there.
“Hello,” Will said. Then more loudly, “Hello?” His voice sounded strange in the empty downstairs. His voice was swallowed by the furniture, the sullen couch, the cheerless paintings, more family pictures that surrounded him in the office. Beth as a baby. Sharon in her class play, a beautiful Alice tumbling down into Wonderland.
The ringing stopped.
“Hello. Whalen, is that you?” Will said.
Come on, asshole, he thought. Don’t screw around. “Whalen . . .”
Then — yes, he heard breathing. God, someone was there. Unless I dialed the wrong number, unless I made a mistake, woke someone up and —
The tree branch scratched at the window again.
Hello. Let me in. We want to come in, the trees, the wind, the rain.
Let us in . . .
“Shit,” Will said.
Then, a last time, “Hello? Who’s there?”
A sound answered him.
A high-pitched squeal. Faint, like an airplane soaring in the distance, but then its engine noise swelling, louder and louder, hurrying to full volume, screaming before Will could yank the phone away, away from his ear —
“Ow!” he yelled. The sound made his eyes cross. And even with the receiver away from his ear, he heard the screech, an electrical scream, unintelligible, mechanical. Piercing, filling the room.
They’ll hear, Will thought. God, the noise was incredible, so loud! He covered his ears. They’ll all hear. Becca, the girls. Even louder, so that the noise cut right through his hands cupped tightly against his ears.
He picked up the phone and slammed it down on the receiver.
Thinking that it wouldn’t do any good.
He waited for everyone to come downstairs, to ask him what that sound was.
Will watched the stairs.
And no one came down.
He looked at the phone. That sound had been incredible. Some stupid phone error, a crazy switching noise . . . something . . .
He looked back at the stairs.
Nobody upstairs heard.
He pushed the books away.
He stared at his window. At the trails made by the rain, running down t
he glass, joining together, running to the ground, chased by the wind.
He watched and listened, and he knew.
Something was wrong with Ted Whalen.
He said he’d stay by his phone. And now he’s been away all day.
Or — Will thought — maybe not. Maybe I’m getting carried away here.
He thought of the cross.
God help us.
And Jim Kiff.
Chewed by fucking rats.
Maybe not.
There was one way to put the issue at rest.
He used the area code to get information to give him the number of the Los Angeles Police. He called them.
Will explained his concern. He spoke to a sergeant with a name that Will missed completely.
But Will told him where his friend Ted Whalen lived. He hasn’t been well, Will lied, though — for all he knew — it might be true.
“He doesn’t answer his phone,” Will explained. “Could you take a look?” Will said that he was a lawyer. He gave his phone number in case there was anything wrong.
No need to call back otherwise . . .
They’d be glad to check, the desk sergeant said from three thousand miles away.
Will said thanks. He hung up.
He waited ten minutes for a callback. Then fifteen minutes more. He looked at Joshua James’s book.
But not the other one.
He told himself he’d wait five more minutes.
Will did. And then, thinking that everything was fine, that the LAPD didn’t find a thing, he got up and went back upstairs. It was late and he should be asleep.
He left his light on in his office.
The dream again. Exactly the same. Sharon and Beth screaming, spinning, flying into the blades. Becca not seeing the clown, not seeing it creep up behind her with the hose. And Will, so wobbly on the blocks, falling down, dodging the meat hooks being waved at him.
Helpless. Totally helpless.
This time, he cried in the dream . . .
* * *
The phone rang. It jangled rudely in the black room.
“Wha?” Will said, shooting up. Becca had the phone. He heard her mumble something groggily into it. And Will thought, Who’d be calling us so late? What the hell time is it? Who’d call so — ?
He remembered.
Becca handed him the phone, hitting his shoulder rather than his outstretched hand.
“Er, it’s a policeman. I —” Becca said.
Will lay flat on the bed, his head against his pillow. It was so black in here, it was like space. Like a coffin. A call into the void.
From the void.
“Yes?” Will said.
“Mr. Dunnigan? This is Detective Swenson, Los Angeles Police.”
Will felt the pillow, soft, incongruous.
From the void, from the tomb.
“Yeah,” Will said.
“Mr. Dunnigan, can I ask you why you called us, sir? Why you wanted us to check on your friend, Mr. Whalen?”
“What is it?” Becca hissed in his ear. “What’s wrong?”
Will shook his head. But she couldn’t see he knew.
“I — I was supposed to call him. A friend” — he said the word, uncomfortable with it —”had died. Ted Whalen had the information. He didn’t sound well when I —”
“I see, Mr. Dunnigan. Well, we went to his house, sir. And —” There was static on the line. The storm, thought Will. The storm. He lost the next few words. “We couldn’t get an answer at the door. But we got a look through a back window. A bathroom window.” The cop hesitated.
“Yes?”
“We saw Mr. Whalen. He was — he was caught, in a cabinet.”
Will thought of a clown, and spinning disks. Around and around. Here we go . . .
“We knocked out the window. We got our flashlights on him. And, sir —”
Don’t let the clown hook you through the neck. That can hurt. And be careful. When you go spinning off the disks.
“Sir, we saw Mr. Whalen and —”
Becca nudged him, hissed close to him, “What is it, Will?”
The cop told him how Whalen had died.
Told him about the moving black rug that covered Whalen’s body, black and glistening, reflecting the light.
How they saw the shape of a man, his back bent over, one arm sticking out. The legs, kneeling. But that it was all black and glistening.
“Mr. Dunnigan, he was being eaten. The ants — big ones — were all over, every inch of him. They were eating him while we watched.”
Will tried to recover a bit. “Was he dead?”
Silence. An interminable silence, stretching across the continent, then words, slow . . . measured. Then the cop said something that made Will gasp, made him turn into his pillow and want to yell, scream.
“No, sir . . . he wasn’t. He had been alive. God help us —”
The words! He said those words!
“ — alive . . . But by the time we got him out of there, the ants off him, he was dead. He was dead. He had no skin left. Nothing.”
Another pause.
And madness danced around the bedroom.
God help us, Will heard.
God help us. God help us. God help us.
Except.
There is no God.
But Will knew now — at last — that he needed help. Of some kind. From somewhere.
Help.
* * *
31
The policeman went on talking, asking questions that Will couldn’t answer, telling him things about Whalen — now called “the deceased” — that Will didn’t want to know.
Then the cop was gone.
Will told Becca what happened.
First, just about Whalen.
She deserved to know, he thought. Sure she does. After all, she’s in the dream too. She has a right.
Then, when he felt her, how cold she was, maybe trembling beside him, he told her the rest. Everything he knew.
About Manhattan Beach.
At first, she didn’t see any connection.
Then she laughed.
“That’s crazy,” she said. “What are you saying?” She laughed again. “That something happened that night?”
“I don’t know what I’m saying,” Will said. Which was true enough.
And he thought that Whalen died knowing something … something that he didn’t.
What the hell is it?
“Maybe I need help.”
She laughed again, a hysterical sound. “Help? What do you mean, ‘help’?”
“I don’t know.” He took a breath. “There’s someone Jim Kiff wanted me to call, a priest, an ex-priest —”
“What?” Becca said.
This isn’t happening, Will thought. Not real. Not fucking verifiable. I’m just getting freaked out —
No. It’s not just that. It’s as if this is a script. A little play unfolding. The Reunion. And I have my fucking part, whether I want to play it.
Or not.
There’s not a damn thing I can do about it.
“I want to go see this man,” Will said.
“Stupid,” Becca said. “Now you’re just being stupid. And” — she took a breath and sighed —”you’re scaring me.”
Will grabbed her hand. His cold hand encircled hers . . .
A script. Everything scripted.
“What you should do is call Tim Hanna,” she said. “Let him know . . .”
Will nodded in the darkness. ‘‘I’ll try. I can try.”
Sure. Because if there’s a script, then Tim has a role too. Something that all his money, all his success building high-rent apartments and office complexes in the new Battery Park City, and in the new Boston Commons, and in the gentrified south Washington, won’t keep him safe from.
Becca lay there quietly.
Will didn’t hear the soothing rhythmic sound of Becca’s breathing, slipping back into sleep.
He turned to her, and saw that she was lying b
eside him wide-eyed. He gave her hand a squeeze.
He said something, meaning it as a joke, a bit of black humor to break the grim night mood. .
“Becca — babe — you haven’t seen any ants around, have you?”
The dumb words were out, hanging in the air. Serious, devoid of even the feeblest shot at humor.
And she turned to him, only her eyes shining in the near-total blackness. “No,” she said calmly, as if he had been checking their milk supply. “No, I haven’t.”
Will turned away.
He lay there a long time, wondering at how he suddenly felt trapped. And what he was going do about it.
* * *
1 A.M.
* * *
32
Will opened his eyes.
He felt the hand locked on his, the bone rubbing against bone. And the sound filled the concrete stairwell. The sound of skin splitting, tiny liquid sounds, bubbles and pops.
But he opened his eyes.
Don’t look at it.
He knew that. I must not look at it —
— or it will be an over.
Instead, he looked at his bag. His bag of tricks.
He felt like a fearless vampire killer. A comic character out of a mock-horror film. Hey, Abbott . . . you’re not going to believe what just came out of this lady here.
His hand fumbled with the latch of the bag.
James said to pray. So he did. Mumbling the words bereft of any meaning for him. Wishing that somehow he believed.
Dear God, have mercy. Guard my soul and protect me against evil.
The words reverberated in the suddenly empty corridors of his mind. Protect me against evil. Protect me against evil.
And a terrible question.
What’s evil?
The latch popped open.
He felt the bony hand squeeze his wrist again. There was a sudden painful spike, the sound of something cracking.
It just crushed my wrist bone, he thought.
But Will didn’t turn. Instead he dug into the bag and grabbed the first thing his hand came to.
He pulled out the jar. He fumbled with the lid.
It was so damn hard to unscrew something with one hand. It didn’t move at all. He brought it against his body.
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