Several of the younger ladies – Brightsky, Crystal, Cherí, and Naomi – seemed vaguely familiar, and Joanna had gathered from her mother that this was because they were actresses or models whose faces she’d seen without learning their names. Universe (formerly Ben) Hallard, on the other hand, was barely recognizable, the monumental Afro of his glory days cropped short and his whipcord body softened by a small paunch. Joanna recalled hearing somewhere that he was making an acoustic comeback album – he’d certainly been playing a guitar as her mother had conducted her and Antryg up the tall double curve of steps to the plantation’s main-floor gallery.
She did recognize – with delight – her mother’s friend and Water-Sister Melinda Moonwillow (formerly Lindy Sorenson of Burbank), tallish and sweet-faced, with her mud-brown hair grown long and starting to gray. It was clear also that three alien abductions hadn’t diminished her delight in baking cookies: a plate of them graced the long dining-table that occupied the gallery, and the scent of another batch drifted from the open French doors of the house. “For goodness sake, honey, you can call me Lindy now!” the older woman admonished as Joanna had hugged her.
“Whatever you say, Mrs. Sorenson.”
Like most old houses in the region, the Big House at Zénobie had originally been constructed on seven-foot brick piers, which had later been enclosed with stucco and brick to form a series of store-rooms beneath the house. Lumen – “Our Teacher’s wife,” her mother had phrased it during the introductions, a tall blonde with a runner’s calves and a wary expression in her gray eyes – gave them a brief outline of the construction and renovation that had taken place so far: ten guest-houses were being built on the site of the old slave-quarters to the north of the house, and both air conditioning and heating were being installed, “Because it can get quite cold here in the wintertime, you know. The contractor’s men cleared out the store-rooms below the house, but locked them securely, and the rooms in the north wing where the floor had to be torn out to be repaired are also kept locked. I thought, myself, that there might have been some sort of wildlife – possums, or nutria – that got in—”
“That wouldn’t explain the whispering I heard!” protested a beautiful dark-haired model named Brightsky.
“—but we found no evidence of it,” continued Lumen, ignoring the younger woman as if she had not existed. “The contractor’s men have the only keys.”
“Naomi heard it, too,” Brightsky persisted, with a nod at a young woman whom Joanna belatedly recognized as having been brutally ax-murdered in the trailers for Friday the Fourteenth Part Seven.
“You’ll have to excuse my daughter,” added Starshine, with a deprecating smile. “She was absolutely born without an imagination – I think she dreams in black and white!”
Thanks, Mom.
“I’m sure you, of all people, will understand, Antryg,” said Dr. Conyer gravely, “that my system of Cosmic Inter-Connectedness can raise tremendous power, linking, as it does, the unlimited potential of fully-awakened human minds with the raw power of universal energies. We can, literally, open the powerhouse of the cosmos, and focus its energies for our benefit – and our first conference here is already sold out. Businessmen, politicians, scientists, educators will be here, some of the finest minds in this country and from as far away as Sweden. It would be potentially devastating, for the whole of the world, to have a malevolent force so strong, so violent, here at the very heart of such an overwhelming psychic node.”
He shuddered as he said it, an incongruously bright figure in a silk Hawaiian shirt and neatly-pressed cargo-shorts. “Evil has a way of spreading.”
“Indeed it does,” Antryg agreed, while Joanna reflected that among businessmen, politicians, scientists etc. – some of whom would probably be bringing their wives (Bet me the Conference is going to include swamp tours and a crawfish boil down by the bayou) – word would also have a way of spreading, if knocking, whispering, and writing on the walls in blood started targeting the guests. “You’re quite right not to risk it.”
“I’m glad you understand. Starshine assures me that we can trust your powers—”
“Good heavens, I hope not,” exclaimed Antryg, “since I don’t have any. I’m a perfectly good wizard in another universe,” he added, to the Teacher’s look of startled dismay. “It’s just that there’s no magic here for me to work with. But I do have experience with ghosts, so if we can’t come to terms with Madamoiselle Zénobie – or whoever the ghost actually is – at least we’ll know more about the situation than we did before. You didn’t think to save any of the blood you found, I suppose? Pity.”
“We’re trying to keep things quiet.” Ben Universe Hallard set aside his guitar (and the anorexic blonde who sat at his feet) and joined the little group at the long dining-table. His voice had the gravelly roughness of long abuse, but was surprisingly quiet and pleasant. “We’ve got local guys working on the guest-houses – I’ll show you around them tomorrow—” His gesture indicated what could have been an outhouse or the Taj Mahal, for all that anyone (except perhaps Antryg) could see. There was no lighting on the grounds. The darkness was absolute. “And to be honest, Chien Mort’s a pretty primitive place. We were afraid they’d walk out if they thought Miss Zénobie was getting—” He paused, fishing for words.
“Restless in her grave?” suggested Joanna, with a sly glance at her mother.
“Pissed at the new owners?” Antryg inquired.
Hallard grinned. “Pretty much.”
Starshine looked shocked at the idea that the dead woman might not be as spiritually evolved as Dr. Conyer’s disciples.
“The contractors are in and out of the house,” added Crystal, a plump red-head whose milky Irish skin was wallpapered with henna designs. “So we had to clean the blood up fast. And anyway, Brightsky had to sleep in that room.”
“You couldn’t move her?” Joanna frowned, disconcerted at the idea. The eerie stillness of the bayou night, the multi-voiced peeping of the tree-frogs whispered of things altogether darker here than copious marijuana and auto-suggestion.
In the pause that went on just a little too long Joanna saw the glance Lumen gave Brightsky, whose eyes flickered Dr. Conyer and then back with wide innocence to Lumen, while the Teacher gazed with equal innocence out into the night. Chad Rainforest came out of the house with a tray of tea-things.
“I’ve made up a bed for you guys in the library,” he said to Antryg and Joanna. “I hope you don’t mind, but the only room in the north wing that hasn’t had its floor torn out for the air conditioning is Galadriel’s. I didn’t want to kick her out—”
“No, we’re fine,” said Joanna, and glanced around at the group on the porch. “Galadriel?”
“My daughter.” Hallard ducked his head apologetically. “Who thinks the whole Institute is hippie New Age bullshit. According to her, the footsteps are figments of everybody’s imagination and the blood is just some kind of game somebody here is playing—”
Did his eyes also, Joanna wondered, go from Lumen to Brightsky’s virginal countenance?
“How anyone who’s seen this place could still refuse to admit the reality of spirit manifestations—” Starshine looked aggrievedly at her daughter as she spoke.
“She’ll tell you all about it over breakfast, I’m sure.”
*
Lying on a futon on the floor, in the smothering darkness of the paint-smelling library, Joanna dreamed about the tower. Square and Victorian, like something out of a Charles Addams cartoon, it rose from the corner of the main block of the house a story and a half above the steamboat-gothic gingerbread of the main roof-line. A woman, thought Joanna…
A woman who paced the empty chamber at the top, heat-lightning playing over her fine-boned face. A brighter stroke showed Joanna the two bodies that lay near the center of the room, skirts spread about them, dark hair mingling on the floor in a dark and sticky pool. A woman and a child…
There was a trap-door at one side of the room and thr
ough it Joanna heard voices coming up from below. The woman stopped her pacing, went to the opening and stood for a long time listening, eyes gleaming in the shadow. Joanna recognized – or thought she recognized – Antryg’s voice, and her own.
*
“So is the place haunted?” she asked Antryg the next morning over coffee, when the other members of the Institute had retired to the deck at the end of the garden to “call down the powers of the Universe to Universal Good.” It was the received wisdom of every ghost-story Joanna had ever read that nothing happened in haunted houses the first night one slept there, but she had the suspicion that Antryg could smell ectoplasm the minute he crossed the threshhold.
“Good Heavens, yes!” He looked surprised she’d had to ask.
“Badly?” She didn’t mean her voice to sound as timid as it did.
“Well, I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered a haunting that one would describe as ‘excellent.’” Antryg solemnly broke one of Lindy’s chocolate-chip cookie into pieces with his crooked fingers. Fresh daily batches were evidently Lindy’s self-appointed mission in the Institute. A small basket of them – wrapped in cellophane to dissuade Louisiana’s ubiquitous ants – had been waiting for them on their futon last night on the library floor.
“Damn it.” Joanna dripped cream into her cup. “I was kind of hoping it was somebody trying to sabotage Dr. Conyer’s upcoming conference, or chase off Mrs. Durham…”
“Why on earth would anyone want to do that?”
“Sabotage the conference? To make the place go bankrupt – Chad said last night there were descendants of its original owners still living in town. Or maybe the locals just don’t want a bunch of New Age woo-woos bringing immorality into town. Any one of the contractor’s men would have access to underneath the house, and once you’re down there you can make footsteps anywhere you want by tapping the underside of the floor with a broom-handle.”
“New Age woo-woos?” He pronounced the words with puzzled care.
“Most of the country isn’t like LA, Antryg. And I noticed last night that while everybody’s sharing rooms in the wings out back, ‘guardian spirit’ Universe Hallard – who put up the dough to buy this place – and his girlfriend have a bedroom in the main house upstairs. The only others who have rooms in the main house are Conyer, Lumen – separate bedroom from Conyer, I notice – and Mrs. Durham, who’s got enough crystallized carbon on her to buy the city of Van Nuys. I’m sure she’s got family members who don’t want to see her dumping their inheritance into Dr. Conyer’s pockets. I’m sorry,” she added, flushing at the recollection of her mother’s words last night. “I don’t know why I’m so skeptical. I get this way when I’m around my mother.”
“You’re skeptical all the time, my dear.” Antryg set down his tea-cup, and gently kissed her hand. “It’s a faculty I treasure in you. You know this world far better than I do; you understand the nuances of how people are likely to interpret a given situation, like the fact that your mother was talking about a television show back in June rather than an actual homicide. But the place is haunted—”
He extended his hand, and held it, fingers spread, close to the newly-white-painted clapboarding of the house wall. “—and quite nastily, by the feel of it. And think how silly we’ll feel if Dr. Conyer’s system does precisely what he says it will, and there is something malevolent – and powerful – here that could devour and build upon the forces that it raises.”
The rap of hammers drifted to them from the semi-circle of half-built guest-houses fifty yards to the north, the sound sharp against the drone of cicadas in the woods all around. In the absence of air conditioning, meals were taken at the long dining-table on the porch, and the remains of scrambled eggs, labneh, bagels and Lindy’s latest batch of chocolate chip cookies littered the snowy expanse of polyester-linen, waiting for the “help” from town to carry them into the kitchen at the back of the main block of the house.
“By the sound of it, something certainly seems to have stirred it up,” added Antryg thoughtfully, and propped his spectacles onto the bridge of his nose. “Although it could just be the remodelling. Ghosts hate that.”
“Or the presence of the girl.” Joanna sipped her coffee. “Isn’t it true that poltergeist activity – and blood is a pretty common poltergeist manifestation, isn’t it? – usually centers around a child or a teen-ager? Even if she isn’t doing it herself, I mean…”
“Dad said I should show you around.” A girl stepped from the dark of the house, small and slight and very clearly Ben Hallard’s daughter. “If you’re done with your breakfast, that is. I’m Galadriel.” She held out her hand.
Antryg rose, took it and bowed deeply; Galadriel Hallard studied him through glasses almost as thick as his own, as if trying to align his lanky height, graying tousle of curls, mad gray eyes and truly regrettable earrings with whatever her father and Joanna’s mother had told her about him. Gauging what her reaction should be – or maybe just wary that she was being mocked. The daughter of a rock star – however minor, Joanna reflected – would have grown up watchful from her cradle.
Joanna got to her feet and shook the girl’s hand. “I’m Joanna Sheraton; this is Antryg Windrose.”
“So are you the Ghostbusters?” Galadriel relaxed, poured herself what was left of the coffee, doctored it heavily with cream and sugar, and took half a cookie.
“That’s us.” Antryg grinned. “I take it you’re not an enthusiast of morning affirmations in the garden?”
“As if.”
Joanna recalled, when she herself had been in junior high school, reading about Ben Hallard’s marriage to an extremely wealthy groupie. The blonde girl he’d been holding hands with last night didn’t look old enough to be Galadriel’s mother, and in fact looked only six or seven years older than Galadriel herself. No wonder the kid looked pouty.
“So what do you think?” inquired Antryg. “Do you think there’s a ghost here?”
“Please.” But she looked aside as she said it.
She took coffee and cookie with her as she led them through the house, past the door of the library where they’d slept – a cat-thin woman from town was already vacuuming where Antryg had packed up the futon before coming out to breakfast – through the kitchen, and onto the back gallery. The house, Joanna now saw, was built as a long U, to funnel what breeze might flow up from the bayou, the main block standing two stories above its tall brick foundation, the tower, three. Behind the main block, two wings stretched, enclosing an unfinished-looking garden between them, and like the main house the single-story wings were also built up on a seven-foot foundation, its stuccoed walls covered with straggly vines and its doors pad-locked.
“Charlie Trasher from town got that whole wing set up for air conditioning before we arrived. ” Galadriel pointed to the south wing. “But the compressor didn’t arrive. And none of the ducts are here for this wing. My room’s the only one on this side that doesn’t have holes in the ceiling and floor. Charlie’s a dork.”
At the far end of the garden – lush with semi-tropical foliage and smelling of yesterday’s rain – an octagonal deck had been built, roofed over but open at the sides, far too large to be called simply a gazebo. Dr. Conyer – presumably chanelling the ancient guru Lal Siva – and his Inner Circle sat on folding chairs, hands joined. The murmur of their voices carried indistinctly through the thick, moist air. The galleries that ran along both inner sides of the wings had been recently repaired, the one on the north side still in a half-constructed state at its far end.
“This room here against the house on this end is going to be a bathroom,” added the girl. “Only it’s not finished, either. That’s a bathroom, too—” She nodded to the corresponding chamber against the house on the south wing. “Next to it is Brightsky’s room, then Chad’s, Crystal and Naomi, and the one at the far end is your mom and Mrs. Moonwillow. Dr. Conyer’s in the main house, with Lumen, my dad and Cherí, and Mrs. Durham.”
“And do the peop
le who put up the most money rate bedrooms in the house?” inquired Antryg, and got a quick sidelong grin from the girl.
“Pretty much. Dad paid for the house, and Mrs. Durham – her husband owned NamCor Pharmaceuticals and sold it for about a zillion dollars – is paying for the guest houses.”
“Is your dad going to make a come-back album?” inquired Joanna, curious. “He did a couple of acoustic numbers on Bent Light—”
“It’s CD-only – no vinyl – so he doesn’t have any kind of distribution. And it’s really my mom who paid for the house.” Sudden bitterness laced the girl’s voice. “And I bet Cherí and all her pals—” She stopped herself with visible effort, and looked aside.
“Are these rooms kept locked?” They had walked the length of the south wing gallery; Joanna gently pushed the French door of her mother’s room. It swung open, showing two beds, a dresser, and a calico cat sleeping on top of the tumbled calamity of her mother’s wardrobe. Jeans and lace thongs and embroidered tops were scattered broadcast over every item of furniture, along with damp towels, bottles of moisturizer, and half a dozen books all written by Dr. Norman Conyer: Lal Siva Speaks, Cosmic Wealth, God Wants You Rich, The Avalanche of Success, et al. Judging by the books in the library, Cosmic Inter-Connectedness was for the most part supposedly a means of inducing the Universe to send you large amounts of money on demand. No wonder businessmen, politicians, educators et al were clamoring to come to the conference here in September.
Zenobie (Windrose Chronicles) Page 2