Unspeakable

by Graham Masterton

  "Well, thank you for that," said Holly, more sharply than she had meant to. "Next time I'm feeling too cheerful, I'll know where to come."

  "I'm only saying what I see, dear. I'm only telling you what my nose tells me."

  The woman shrugged and placidly went back to her price labels. Holly stayed and watched her for a few moments. She was irritated by the woman's impertinence, but at the same time she was anxious to find out what she meant bybad fortune.What had George said about Raven?Raven is a scavenger who takes away people's luck, bit by bit.

  After a while the man with the shaving-brush eyebrows came up to the desk carrying two books about George Stevens and David O. Selznick. He gave her a wary look and so she turned and left.

  As she reached the door the woman looked up and said, "You remember what I said, dear: Don't you go looking behind you, whatever you do."

  Blood on the Moon andOther Expressions

  On the second occasion that the Portland Police Bureau had asked her to help them to lip-read a surveillance video, one of the suspects had used the phraseI wouldn't know him from Adam's housecat.

  Holly's interest had been aroused, because she had only ever heard anybody sayI wouldn't know him from Adam.She had mentioned it to Dick Cass, a young English teacher she knew, and Dick had looked it up in the University of Portland library. It turned out thatAdam's housecatwas commonly used in southern states, while west of the Appalachians the saying changed intoI wouldn't know him from Adam's off-ox.

  She realized then that she could not only identify people's regional origins from their accents but from the names they called everyday things, from old cars to rocking chairs to fried potatoes. In West Virginia they called a clap of thunderthe old bread wagonbecause rain made the crops grow. In Oregon they used the phrasecouple-threeto meanseveral.

  Across the country she discovered that there were more than 176 different names for dust balls under the bed.

  Some of the sayings were so locally specific that she could occasionally tell which county or even which town a suspect had been raised in. Pennsylvanians from the Manheim area still said that they "spritzed" the lawn instead of sprinkled it. When Texans from Brownsville complained that somebody was "admiring" them, they meant that they were being given the evil eye.

  Down in certain parishes in Florida, people spoke of a place being "creepified" instead of scary. "That was a right boogerish place, that old house, real creepified."

  Holly had been right to guess that the woman in the bookstore came from Maryland or northern Virginia.Blood on the moonwas a Baltimore expression meaning a suspicious, menacing, or foreboding set of events.

  A Black Painting

  On an impulse she called Katie at the office and told her she was going to be half an hour late. She walked instead to Yamhill Street and went into the small, white-fronted Summers Gallery, which was owned and run by her older brother Tyrone. It was fashionably minimalist: The only painting displayed in the window was a naked man rendered in bright aqua-marine, entitledBlue Roger.

  Inside, the gallery was cool and cream, with paintings spaced at tasteful intervals along the walls and several bronze and stone sculptures on stark white plinths. Tyrone was sitting at his desk at the rear of the gallery, talking on the phone. Apart from his phone/fax and the latest issue ofArchitectural Digest,there was nothing on his desk but a single yellow rose in a clear glass vase. A young man with scraggly bleached-blond hair and a faded denim jacket was sprawled on a tan leather armchair, idly tearing up a catalog of early American art, rolling it into little balls, and trying to toss them into Tyrone's discarded moccasins.

  Tyrone himself looked strikingly like Holly, only very much taller. His hair was darker than hers, and his eyes were brown where hers were greenish-onyx. His nose was larger and sharper, but he had the same slightly fey quality, as if both of them might have been changelings. It was a look they had inherited from their Finnish forebears by way of their mother.

  "Hi, Matthew," said Holly, to the paper-tosser. "You're not bored, by any chance?"

  "Bored? Bored doesn't even comeclose. I am way beyond boredom, in a fourth dimension of total yawnation, where I am losing interest even inbreathing."

  Tyrone gave Holly a finger wave and said, "Sorry, Holly, I won't be long. I'm trying to arrange a special exhibition."

  He listened, and nodded, and then he said, "Tsimshian transformation masks. Very deep Native American stuff. Like, very,verydeep." Then, into the phone: "Yes, Ms. Spring Moon, Idounderstand their mystical significance. Yes, I know. Of course your shaman can supervise their hanging. We wouldn't want to upset any malevolent spirits, now, would we?"

  As Tyrone talked, Matthew was mimicking his exaggerated hand gestures, so Tyrone threw the copy ofArchitectural Digestat him and hit him on the shoulder.

  "Ow!"Matthew protested.

  "I don't know why you don't find yourself something more challenging to do," Holly suggested, taking off her raincoat and sitting down next to him.

  "I don't think there's anything more challenging in the whole world than trying to bug Tyrone. Except-I don't know-maybe climbing the east face of Mount Hood in midwinter, totally naked."

  "Oh my God. So long as you don't expect me to watch you do it."

  Holly waited for a while, but Matthew kept on tossing paper and Tyrone kept on talking, and nodding, and saying "Uh-huh, uh-huh," so in the end she stood up and walked along the gallery looking at the paintings. Most of them were strong, simplistic images in primary colors: nudes, abstracts, landscapes. But at the very end of the gallery there was a large painting propped up against the wall that appeared to be nothing but solid black.

  When she approached it, however, she realized that the paint had varying textures, some of them glossy and some of them matte. In the very center, too, almost invisible from a distance, were two dark red circles, like totally bloodshot eyes. Viewing the painting from an angle, so that the lights shone across it, Holly was sure that she could distinguish the ragged outline of black feathers.

  She suddenly felt as if somebody had come very close up behind her and was breathing against her neck. Her first instinct was to turn around, but then she thought of what the woman in the Bellman Bookstore had warned:There's something following you Something behind you Don't you go looking behind you, whatever you do.

  This is completely irrational,she thought.There can't be anybody there.But she felt ridiculously reluctant to look around, and she was sure that somebody was breathing very close to her ear.

  She was still standing in front of the black painting when Tyrone came up to her and put his arm around her shoulders. "What do you think of it?" he asked.

  "I don't know. Who painted it?"

  "Some guy who came in this morning. He asked if I'd consider selling it for him."

  "Does it have a title?"

  "It's calledIll Fortune VII.Don't ask me why. I haven't seenIll Fortune IthroughVI."

  "You're kidding me. That's what it's called?"

  "Why should I kid you?"

  "I don't know. I think I'm being, what, hypersensitive. Superstitious, maybe. It's just that somebody wished bad luck on me this morning and ever since then I keep on seeing things. I don't exactly know what you'd call them omens, Iguess."

  "Omens? What? You mean like black cats and funeral processions and haloes around the sun?"

  "No, I just mean things that make me feel uneasy." She told him how Elliot Joseph had put a curse on her in the courtroom, and about the Porsche parked on Salmon Street and what the woman in the Bellman Bookstore had said. "And now this painting,Ill Fortune VII.And itcouldbe a raven, couldn't it?"

  Matthew had joined them. He tilted his head on one side and said, "It could be a raven, yes. But then it could equally be the inside of Mike Tyson's shorts at midnight."

  "For Christ's sake, Matthew," said Tyrone. Then to Holly: "Why don't you join us for lunch? We were only going across to the Quarter Deck for a sandwich."

  Memories of Bad Luck<
br />
  "Ever since you were a kid, you always seemed to know when bad things were going to happen, didn't you?" said Tyrone. He had put his half-glasses on and he was picking stray alfalfa sprouts off his plate and nibbling them. "Don't you remember that Fourth of July when that girl from next door got burned? What was her name?"

  "Margaret Pickard," said Holly. "How could I ever forget?"

  "What was that all about?" asked Matthew, his mouth obscenely full of sandwich.

  Tyrone tidily patted his lips with his napkin. "I guess it was Holly's deafness: It gave her kind of a psychic awareness. You know, things that most people don't usually pick up on. She could always tell you if it was going to rain, for instance."

  "In Portland? You don't need a psychic awareness for that. It happens once every fifteen minutes, without fail."

  "No, there were other things too. Like, she could tell when the phone was going to ring about ten seconds before it did. And once we were walking through Waterfront Park and an old guy was mowing the grass on a ride-on mower and Holly said, 'You have to stop him, he's going to hurt himself.' Well, our dad went over and talked to the old guy, but of course the old guy just laughed. The next thing we knew, he was trying to clear a piece of broken branch out of the mower blades, and somehow it started up and chopped most of his fingers off. I'll never forget that. He was standing there with his hand held up and only his thumb and half of his index finger left, and blood running off his elbow, and he was staring at Holly with thislook,like she had actually made it happen."

  "Excuse me. I'm trying to eat a very rare steak sandwich here."

  "Well, come on, Matthew, you wanted to know. What happened on the Fourth of July was different, though. This girl next door, Margaret, she was only about eleven, and she was real quiet and never said a word to anyone. The neighbors had a big Fourth of July barbecue with a bonfire and professional fireworks. But Margaret's parents kept teasing her to mingle with the boys, and in the end she went off up to her room because she was so shy."

  Holly said, "I was sitting in the garden, on a bench under the trees, and I had a premonition. I mean an actualvision,almost, of a girl falling, her arms spread out wide, and she was burning. It was, like, I don't know: like an angel falling out of heaven. You know those medieval paintings. The trouble was, I didn't know who it could be. I just kept on seeing it again and again."

  "Holly came and told me," Tyrone put in. "I told my mom but my mom didn't really know what to do. It's a bit of a downer if you go up to your hosts at a Fourth of July party and say, 'Excuse me, my daughter's had this premonition that somebody's going to burn to death.' So mom told dad and between them they agreed to keep a careful eye on all of the kids around the bonfire."

  "Right near the end of the party they had this incredible rocket display," said Holly. "There were dozens and dozens of rockets, and I saw Margaret come out onto the balcony in front of her parents' bedroom to watch it. I'll never forget it. She was wearing this white flouncy frock with a big pink bow, and a bow in her hair."

  Tyrone said, "Something went wrong. One of the rockets misfired and flew toward the house. It hit Margaret and it exploded, and there was this terrible crackling noise-you know, like rockets make when they explode in the sky."

  Holly shook her head, because of course she hadn't heard it herself. "Margaret caught fire. I could see that she was screaming. She spread her arms wide and she jumped off the balcony, and she fell onto the steps at the back of the house. They threw buckets of water over her and tried to roll her in a tablecloth, but the rocket was all magnesium and she kept on burning and burning and they couldn't put her out."

  "Holy shit," said Matthew, putting down his sandwich and wiping his hands on his pants. "And you reallyknewthat was going to happen?"

  "I don't know. Maybe it was more of an intuition than a genuine vision. After all, childrendoget burned at fireworks parties, don't they? Just like gardeners accidentally chop their fingers off in mowing machines."

  Tyrone took hold of Holly's hand. "You're not feeling any bad vibes like that now, are you? Don't let this Joseph asshole get to you. He was the one who beat up on his kid, wasn't he? So you shouldn't lethimmakeyoufeel guilty."

  "I still feel-I don't know-maybe that woman in the bookstore was right. Maybe she could sense bad luck coming, the way I used to."

  "Holly, there's no such creature as Raven. There's nothing after you. And if that painting really gives you the heebie-jeebies, I'll tell that guy to come and take it away."

  "No, that's okay. It's only a painting, and like Matthew said, it's probably not a raven at all."

  "You should take Katie and Doug up on their offer. Go off to the lake for the weekend, take a break. You deserve it."

  "Maybe you're right."

  "Hey, listen, Holly," said Matthew, "before you go, you don't see any bad luck comingmyway, do you? I mean, if I'm going to catch fire or chop all my fingers off, I'd really like to know about it."

  Tyrone rolled up his eyes in exasperation, but Holly said, "Okay, then, give me your hand." Matthew wiped it on his pants again and held it out. Holly held it for a while and closed her eyes.

  "Yes ." She nodded. "You're finally going to decide that bugging Tyroneisn'tenough of a challenge."

  "And?"

  "Like you said, you're going to climb the east face of Mount Hood in midwinter, totally naked."

  "Hey, I don't call that bad luck. That'll be cool!"

  "Cool? You think so? You're going to run out of rations on the way up, and by the time you get to the top you're going to have nothing left but a frozen Twinkie."

  Matthew tugged his hand away and gave her a playful slap. "Your sister, Tyrone! What a saucy mare!"

  Blood in the Street

  Holly and Tyrone left the Quarter Deck hand in hand while Matthew trucked along the sidewalk a few paces in front of them, snapping his fingers.

  "Whatdoyou see in him?" asked Holly.

  Tyrone smiled. "He keeps my feet on the ground. Stops me from being too queeny."

  "You were neverqueeny. Just artistic."

  "Holly, I know my weaknesses."

  Holly said, "Katie and Doug are trying to pair me off with Katie's cousin. Some guy called Ned."

  "You don't sound very enthusiastic about it."

  "I don't know. I just don't like blind dates, that's all."

  "It won't be a blind date; it'll be a deaf date."

  She gave him two sharp nudges with her elbow, and he laughed and almost lost his balance on the curb.

  "Sorry, sorry, sorry!" he said. "But seriously, I think it's about time you found somebody. It doesn't have to be the love of your life, after all. But you've always said that being deaf makes it difficult for you to socialize. It's bound to. Why not give him a try? I mean, he can't be that much of a freak, can he?"

  "You want to bet? He's in wood pulp."

  "Oh. I have to confess that I don't know a whole lot about wood pulp."

  "Neither do I. But I expect I'm going to find out."

  They were about to cross the street when Holly realized that something was happening on the opposite corner. A streetcar had come to a halt at the intersection, and a crowd of people were gathered around the front of it. An ambulance came speeding down Third Street, its lights flashing, quickly followed by two police cars.

  "Oh God, there's been an accident," said Matthew. "Somebody's been knocked over."

  "Come on," said Tyrone, taking Holly's arm. "We can go in by the back door. You don't want to see this."

  But as Tyrone led Holly away from the scene of the accident, the crowds parted as if they had been choreographed, and she could suddenly see quite clearly what had happened. The man she had met in the Bellman's Bookstore, the man with the shaving-brush eyebrows that she had imagined for a moment was David, was lying on the streetcar tracks, on his back, with his arms spread. His face was as pale as a suffering medieval martyr, and his lips were wet with blood. More blood was running across the street and creeping
along the pavement, heading southwest.

  "Oh, shit," said Matthew, and pressed his hand in front of his mouth and started to retch.

  "Come on," said Tyrone.

  But Holly couldn't take her eyes away from the vision of the man with the shaving-brush eyebrows and the green Burberry coat just like the one David had worn. The streetcar had rolled over him and stopped and its front wheel was resting in the middle of his chest, so that he was almost cut in half. Pale and martyred as he was, he was staring up at the sky with a strangely confident look in his eyes, as if he were hoping that this had never happened and that it was nothing more than a bad dream.