by Noel Hynd
“Hey! Miss Carlson?” Silva demanded.
Annette turned and rushed past both of them, ignoring Silva in particular. She didn’t bother with the elevator. Instead, she ran up the front steps. The building was quiet. It was mealtime in the refectory. There was a dull distant murmur of aged voices in the dining area. Annette went to room Twenty. The door was closed. Annette, her pulse pounding, put a hand to the doorknob and threw the door open.
What she had known was confirmed. “Oh, God,” she said softly, her voice almost breaking.
Mrs. Ritter’s bed had been stripped, the mattress removed. It awaited a new tenant. The dresser drawers had been left open and were empty. There were two large suitcases near the door, presumably packed with the old woman’s clothing. The window was half open, as if to air out the room. All furniture had been pushed against one wall. The chamber smelled of an antiseptic cleaning solution: pine-scented mortality.
Annette felt tears in her own eyes. Then she felt a sudden hand on her shoulder. A strong hand. A man’s.
Annette’s heart bolted into her throat. She jumped and whirled. Silently, Mike Silva had arrived beside her.
His eyes were trained into hers. She pushed his hand away.
“Mrs. Ritter?” Silva said. “That’s what I try to tell you.”
Annette shuddered.
“They try to call you downstairs,” he said. “Since this morning. I guess you not been home.”
“I was out much of the day,” she answered. Annette formed the next sentence several seconds before she asked it. “Is that when she died?” Annette asked. “This morning?”
“Never woke up this morning,” Mike Silva said. “No come to breakfast, then the nurses find her. Very peaceful. Never knew what happened.” Annette let the reality of it sink in as Mike continued to talk. “Sometime these real old people go like that.” Silva snapped his fingers. A loud jarring pop. Death could be that simple.
“Sure,” said Annette.
In Annette’s mind, the old schoolteacher was speaking. “I’m not sure anymore what the big fuss is all about. I don’t know what everyone’s so afraid of. Death should be seen as a liberation.”
Mike Silva’s tone of voice changed. He sounded more sympathetic.
“You liked the old girl, huh?” he said.
Annette nodded.
“She liked you. You were very kind,” he said. “You gave her some happiness in her last days.” He paused. “You need help with the table?”
Annette turned toward Silva and stared at him. “With what?” she asked.
“The checkerboard table. That’s why they try to call you. That’s why you here now, no?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“I’ll show you.”
Silva led Annette into the room. “Hey, you know I used to make jokes about her flying that silly checkerboard table,” he said. “I don’t mean no harm, lady.” Mike walked to where the furniture was arranged against the wall. “I ain’t a bad guy,” he said.
Maybe not, Annette decided, but he still gave her the creeps.
“She leave you her favorite possession,” the porter continued.
“See?” He pointed to the checkerboard table.
And somewhere in a corner of Annette’s mind, Mrs. Ritter was chattering about tipping the table: “Communicate with the spirits! Conjure up the dead!”
Sure. And you needed three people who believed. Now the original believer was gone. Mike continued to talk, sometimes aimlessly. Annette had a way of tuning him in and out. But as it happened, Mike, who worked seventy hours a week at Mid Island, always had his ears open. He knew too much about everyone’s business.
The checkerboard table had been set aside within Mrs. Ritter’s room. From the bottom of it hung a small white tag, much like one that would display a price in a Goodwill store.
“I got to tell you somethin’,” Mike said. “I got to show you somethin’, too.”
Mrs. Ritter had left a will, the porter explained. That document was held downstairs, awaiting the arrival of Ned Schwinn, the mouthpiece of inevitability for estates in Nantucket which had no one to closely monitor them. But subsequent to the will, which had last been updated, Mrs. Ritter had also left some very recent instructions. The table had been left to Annette, the only person who had ever admired it.
“How do you know?” Annette asked.
“She tell me last week,” Mike said, as if it were obvious. “She tell me that she want that jerk lawyer to come over to change her will. Mister Schwinn. You pardon me, Miss Carlson, but Mister Ned Schwinn’s a real bloodsucker. He never comes by unless he smells cash. You ask for weeks, he never come. So Mrs. Ritter tells me. She always talked to Mike. You hear what I saying?”
“Uh huh,” Annette said steadily.
“Your friend Mike be rough sometimes. I no mean to be. But I see a lot here. I see old people, they give me specific instructions. Do this if I die. Do that. ‘Never mind the will, don’t let my no-good daughter-in-law get my rings.’ And so on.” Mike paused. “So don’t wait around for no will to be read, pretty lady. Things disappear. Sons. Nephews. Cousins. They don’t care nothing for these people when they’re alive, then grab what they can get when these old people are dead. Vultures. I show you.”
Silva led Annette to the table. There was a tag upon it, unmistakably in Helen Ritter’s crimped handwriting, bequeathing the table to Annette Carlson.
“You take it now?” Mike asked. “That’s what she say she wanted. Get it out of here before somebody steal it.”
Silva looked around. “There was this little pink glass that used to sit on it,” he said. “That’s already gone. See what I mean?”
“All right,” Annette said. “I’ll take the table now.”
She placed her hands on it. The walnut wood had a warm, mellow texture, rich and solid and welcoming to its new owner. Yet it was light enough for a woman to carry.
“You got a car?” Silva asked.
“I can walk.”
“Now is a good time.”
Now was. Mike took the table under his arm. He led Annette to the back stairs, the fire exit of the home, and down one flight. No use having extra eyes upon them while walking through the lobby. They came to the rear door of the building, a fire exit. Mike braced it open with the morning’s Boston Globe, keeping the lock from catching. Then he carefully handed the checkerboard table to Annette Carlson.
“I glad you come over,” he said. “She felt strong that you should have it.” He looked at the table, then at Annette. “Hey? Why you come by if you don’t know she’s dead?”
Annette opened her mouth to speak. Then she realized. Mrs. Ritter passed my way a final time. She sent me to pick up the table.
“I just felt like dropping in,” Annette said.
“Yeah. Well, good you did, huh?” Silva said. “Funny little table. Somebody would have stolen it.” He shrugged. “Must mean something.”
“It must,” Annette agreed. “Thank you.”
He looked at her strangely. Another question formed on his lips. He hesitated, then grinned. “You going to try to fly it?”
“You never know, Mike,” she said. She found herself smiling. “If I ever found the right number of people, maybe I would.”
He shrugged again and grinned. “Yeah,” he said. “Got to follow her instructions, don’t you? Well,” he said, “so long.”
“So long.”
The checkerboard table was even lighter than Annette had first thought. She had no trouble walking it home as a calm evening settled upon the island.
Chapter Twenty-three
Tim Brooks’ Jeep was parked in the semicircular driveway before Annette’s house. He was leaning against the front of his vehicle when he saw her. For a moment he watched her walk up Cort Street, carrying the checkerboard table. Then he walked toward her, taking the table when he reached her side.
“Hello,” he said.
“I’ve had more problems,”
she said. “In the house.”
They both stopped. “Uh huh,” he said.
“Want to hear?” she asked.
“I came when you called, didn’t I?”
“Mrs. Ritter…” she began.
“I know. She died.” He looked at the table and recognized it.
“She left me this,” Annette said.
Brooks nodded. They started walking back toward her house.
“I saw Mrs. Ritter earlier today,” Annette said calmly.
He frowned. “Just before she died?”
“No,” she said. ‘Just after. In my house. She visited.” His head turned toward her. As they walked, she related the whole day to him—the tinkering with the place setting, the visit by Mrs. Ritter toward six in the evening, her disappearance, the glass of water, and then her run to Mid Island.
They stopped on her front lawn, not far from his car. She continued to talk. He listened attentively as he always did, saying very little. A question here. A nod there.
She finished her story.
“What do you think?” she finally asked.
“Come on,” he said, trying to cheer her. “I’ll walk inside with you. If there’s a problem, I won’t leave.”
“Thank you.”
He carried the checkerboard table indoors. She took it from him in the living room and placed it against the far wall opposite the fireplace. The table fit perfectly into the previously empty spot.
She stepped back from it. The top of the table looked empty. It cried out for something. She placed a pewter candlestick upon it. The stick held a pink candle. The pinkness reminded her of the stolen vase. And the vase reminded her of Mrs. Ritter.
Impulsively, without saying anything, Annette lit the candle.
In memory. And to cheer the room.
Brooks watched her silently.
“Follow me,” Annette asked.
The policeman did. From the living room to the dining room, he trailed her.
“There’s the place setting,” she said. “Exactly as I left it. Or I should say, as Mrs. Ritter left it.”
“Uh huh,” he said.
She turned upon him with irritation. “You don’t believe me, do you?” she snapped. “When it comes right down to it, you don’t believe me!”
“I’m trying hard to,” he said. “I believe something’s going on here and…”
“Oh, thanks!” she snapped, her anger rising. “I’m terrified, no one will help me, and you think ‘something’s going on’! What’s the matter with everyone around here?”
He placed a hand on hers. “I’m on your side,” he said calmly. “I’m trying to find answers.”
Annette moaned in desperation. The urge was upon her to pack her bags and take the next flight out of this place. At least the lunacy in Los Angeles was predictable. Brooks, thinking that his gesture might be misread, released her hand.
“I’ve had a brutal day, myself,” he said. “I had a forcible arrest in the morning. We had to close Orange Street due to a moped accident at the lunch hour. Then in the late afternoon I learned our department succeeded in getting an indictment in the Mary Elizabeth DiMarco case.”
“What?” Annette asked, looking up.
“The boyfriend,” he said. “Eddie. Indicted for murder. He’s being arrested.”
Annette opened her mouth to respond.
But another force answered, instead.
As Annette Carlson and Timothy Brooks stood in the dining room, they heard first the distinctive crash of a piece of china. Then another. It came from the living room. It was followed by an avalanche of matching, tingling, crashing sounds, followed closely by the sound of more plates and cups tumbling rapidly from shelves onto the floor.
Then, in a continuation, there were more heavy sounds. Destruction. Shattering. The tormented ripping away of ancient wood and antique bolts, culminating in a tremendous, hideous thundering crash.
They both thought: What in God’s name… ! ?
They turned. They moved quickly into the front entrance foyer. They stood in the door that led to the living room. They watched with mutual fear and a total lack of comprehension. The huge china cabinet, the one that no four men together could budge, the one that had been solidly bolted to the east wall of the house, had been ripped from its sturdy moorings and propelled inexplicably and violently forward.
Ripped and propelled by a power that neither Annette nor Tim could see.
There had been no earthquake and there had been no sonic boom. No quirk in the atmosphere. Nor had the huge cabinet, in excess of eight hundred pounds, simply tipped. It had been thrown several feet!
From where Annette and the policeman stood, trying to comprehend the incomprehensible, it was quite clear what had happened. The cabinet had flown forward away from the wall, heaved by some hideously powerful force. It had been launched with great strength, because its bottom had moved seven or eight feet from the wall. And it had flown through the air and torn up whatever lamps and chairs and rugs and electrical cords had been in its path. It was as if it had existed in a doll’s house and had been walloped by some tremendous invisible fist. For several seconds Annette stared at the wreckage. The actuality of this, like seeing Mrs. Ritter, like the visit from the young woman in white, like the stories about the checkerboard table, was so estranged to reality that it was difficult to absorb. But there it was before both of them. No one could tell her she had imagined this. She even had a witness.
The contents of the cabinet, Annette’s china, most of it cracked or crushed, were buried beneath a mountain of splintered wood. It lay in all corners of the room, as well as beneath the wreckage of the old cabinet itself. White dust rose. Powder from aged plaster, pouring forth from the deep wounds in the wall, rose and misted.
Annette stood in the doorway and stared, trying to make some sense out of it. Across the room, in the direction that the cabinet had flown, Mrs. Ritter’s table stood in the safe corner where Annette had placed it only moments earlier. It was unscathed. The little pewter candlestick upon it hadn’t moved, either. Upon it, the pink candle gently burned.
But as if that was not enough, both Annette and Timothy then saw what they would forever perceive to be the culprit. Nothing within their life experience could have readied them for the terror they then felt.
From under the crashed cabinet, from the corners of the room, there gathered dark pieces of a cloud. At first it looked like the low masses of condensation that sit upon a field at dawn, or steam from dry ice. But gradually it came together and began to take shape. It formed and came apart and tried to form again. Annette, in her wide-eyed terror, stepped away from the doorway. The cloud rose and Annette recognized it.
She recalled it from the night of the woman in white, the dark mass that she had witnessed across her lawn, cutting her off from the stars. It formed and reformed. It almost tried to take a human form, but then it became amorphous again. Suddenly there was a foul smell in the room. It was an unspeakably putrid and repulsive odor, reminding Brooks of a month-old decaying body he had once found in the trunk of a stolen car in San Jose.
The smell of rotting flesh, of death itself.
And the air temperature dropped. It tumbled through reality.
It plunged into freezing and beyond.
Slowly, as if rising from the very lowest thresholds of their own hearing, both human witnesses became aware of the low, horrible sound of a man moaning in great agony. The sound was unmistakable. It didn’t come from anywhere, but they both heard it. It was inside their heads and it accompanied the sudden assemblage of the cloudy mass into a single black presence in her home.
Annette’s back was against the wall near the front door. She pressed herself against Tim Brooks. Instinctively, he wrapped an arm around her and held her tightly. She shielded her eyes from the horror.
He didn’t. He watched.
Transfixed, he gazed upon the black form as if he were studying Death itself. He thought to reach for his pistol bu
t realized how pointless and pathetic that gesture would be.
The mass took something close to a human form.
Arms. Shoulders. A torso.
Then it came apart again, dismembered. And he knew it was the same figure, the same presence that had lurked by the foot of his bed during his nightmare.
“This isn’t happening,” he thought. “This isn’t real!”
But it was.
The only sound now was Annette screaming. Frantic. Hysterical. Hellish. Blood curdling. A scream into Brooks’ ear unlike one that she had ever uttered before or could ever launch again. A scream that could raise demons.
The mass approached. It was like a huge cloud. Darkness moved toward them.
Annette screamed again. The stench and the coldness grew more intense. On Mrs. Ritter’s walnut wood table, the pink candle burned peacefully. Then the flame flickered and wanted to expire. It wavered and was almost out. But it stayed and grew strong again.
The black cloud recoiled from the humans. It eased away. It struggled to find a shape again but could retain none. It withdrew in the direction of the rear of the house. It withdrew toward the kitchen.
Tim Brooks watched it recede. Then, taking a chance, he left Annette behind and followed.
The black presence turned a corner—or seemed to—and drifted into her kitchen. It traveled with the ease and waywardness of a thin trail of smoke.
Tim Brooks watched it go. He pursued. Then the dark vision dissipated into the air: Brooks stared at the space into which it had vanished. He stared, doubting the credibility of his own eyes for the first time in his life.
It was a cloud of dust, he tried to tell himself. Dust and particles stirred up from the collapse of the bookcase. That’s all. Our eyes are playing tricks on us.
He knew he was lying to himself.
Silence. Total silence within 17 Cort Street.
Sobs followed. Muffled crying. Brooks turned back to the woman he had left. He rushed to her.
Annette was cowering against the front door, her arms trembling, and her eyes wide, red and wretched. She sobbed uncontrollably. And he felt the question shoot through him: why wasn’t he every bit as shattered?
He held her. He held her tightly and her body convulsed against his. He reached beyond her and opened the front door of the house. He led her out into the evening.