The Man Who Would Not Die

by Thomas Page

  “One must have hope, Lawrence.”

  “I know that. Mercy’s a little hard to come by though. I’ll let you know how everything turns out, sir.” He carried the oscilloscope to his car.

  “Do that,” said Jordan. “And watch out for chance collisions, some may be beneficial.”

  Ten-thirty-five.

  Mr. Fudd snoozed contentedly at Kate’s feet. Kate was bone-tired as she always was after too much wine. But she was painfully awake, her brain churning about Hadley and Forrester.

  “Fudd,” she said softly, digging the heels of her hands against her closed eyes. She felt the cat’s head come up. “Help me with this one, old buddy. All I have to do is get out of bed, pick up the phone, and call Nora. She said to call anytime. She looked at me weird. She knows, Fudd, or she suspected something. Yes, sir, just get up and call Nora.”

  Now she knew why in a crisis people acted with inappropriate slowness, why the Titanic passengers went down singing hymns instead of scrambling for their lives. No doubt everyone on the Titanic felt slightly silly wearing those lifebelts over their tuxedos right up till the water closed over their heads. After that, they felt silly about not acting more decisively.

  Fudd hissed. His tiny claws dug so hard through the blanket she could feel them scratch her toes just as he launched himself off the bed out the door and into the safety of the bathroom.

  “Kate.”

  He was back. Already she felt the chill in the apartment. The barricade of excuses and explanations she had built against her primal gut certainties collapsed with that voice. He was not in the hall or the room or behind the door. He was everywhere.

  “Kate?”

  “Daniel, go away,” she whispered.

  She lowered her hands from her eyes and stared straight up at the ceiling. Then she looked at the door. He was not there. She looked at the wall at the end of the bed. He was not there. She turned her head to her right to look out the window at the other building. Her heart jarred to a stop and her stomach caved in.

  Daniel Forrester was on the bed with her, his wide, smiling face not six inches from hers, resting on the same pillow. He was so close she could smell the cologne he wore the last day she saw him in Clayton, she could see the slight stubble of beard round his chin, the hazel corona round his eyes staring soulfully right into hers. As lovers they had lain together like this.

  Daniel Forrester was dead. The Santa Eulalia house was the one in which he had grown up, the corner room was where he had spent hours reading science fiction books. Her casual lover was the phantom that terrified a family out of town and confronted Nora Stone. She knew exactly when he died, too—the night she dreamed she was in a fog and he was looking for her.

  Kate slowly sat up. Daniel Forrester’s soft eyes followed her. Quietly, firmly, she said, “Daniel go away.”

  “I love you.”

  “Go away, please, Daniel.”

  “Come with me.”

  “Where to?”

  “Where I am.”

  “No, leave me be, Daniel.”

  “I love you. Stay with me, Kate. Come with me. Me. Me.” The soft voice whose resonant depth filled the room vibrated into broken syllables. And without a whisper to mark his passage, Daniel Forrester was gone, leaving her alone on the bed.

  Very carefully, Kate swung her feet over the side and slid them into her sandals. Her overnight bag was by the bathroom door and her purse was in the living room. The trick was to get to her checkbook inside the drawer.

  As Kate stood up, Daniel Forrester stepped out of the corner by the bathroom. His face was imprinted with anger again. He said, “Dutton.”

  Kate could not speak. Her throat was sealed tight, constricted by wine, cold, and terror.

  Daniel Forrester mumbled, the words coming from everywhere, icy with infinite fury. “Will you please find Dutton for me, I’ve looked and looked . . .”

  “Who?”

  The rage transmuted to that Cheshire-cat smile again as he passed across the bureau to the door. “I love you,” he said. “I love you, Kate.”

  Kate covered her ears and wept. “Daniel, stop it. Go away. I know what happened, you’re dead and I’m sorry. I’m so sorry for you, but please leave me alone . . .”

  Again in one of those disconcerting slips of perception, she found herself alone. How did he move? Where did he go? She could feel the room rapidly warming up again. Kate grabbed her overnight bag, stuffed some underwear in it, and then dashed into the living room.

  She could not leave Fudd. The cat was cowering in his bathroom sandbox. She gathered him in her arms and tried to organize her panic. Naturally she made stupid decisions. The sliding doors had to be shut, the wine glasses had not been washed, the lights were on, meaning the electric bill would be huge. . . . As she stood in the center of the room, a crash buffeted the apartment. The lights flickered and there he was again, standing before the sliding doors, his sleepy face baffled. “Don’t go away. What are you doing?” The most terrifying aspect of him was his normality—he stood there with exactly the same surprised, slightly hurt look on his face he’d had when he was alive.

  The assaults of terror on Fudd’s feline sensibility finally crowded all but madness from it. With a screech, the cat sprang from Kate’s arms, ripping her sweater and gashing her arm. Scarcely had he hit the floor when his legs propelled him off it again, bared fangs and outstretched claws aimed directly at the apparition.

  Like an arrow going through smoke, Mr. Fudd passed squarely through Daniel Forrester’s chest and sailed through the open sliding window. His snarls changed to fading impotent cries all the way down the building.

  It happened so fast, and was so ludicrously tragic, Kate was stunned with horror. Dragging her overnight bag, she instinctively stepped forward toward the window before her mind warned her that Daniel Forrester was still there.

  Forrester seemed uncertain about what had happened, startled that anything else existed besides Kate. What Nora Stone had said about such beings fit him perfectly. He was the distilled unconscious of himself, a storm of disconnected memory fragments churned about by primal instincts. That was why his moods changed so quickly. As he had said himself in the park, he was nothing but moods, and they jumbled together without logic.

  His figure seemed to pulsate and grow a bit. When alive, anger had caused him to puff himself up. He began to babble, and his voice had the same venom he had used on the doctor in the lodge. “He’s such a little creep, Kate, I’ll kick his face in if he ever shows up around me. Get rid of him. I mean it . . .” It was some seconds before she realized he was talking about Steve. “I’ll find him. I’ll get him, he’ll wish he’d never touched you . . .”

  Kate backed up to the door, yanked it open, and ducked into the hall. She slammed the door and dashed down toward the elevators. The elevator light blinked green, the door opened and Daniel Forrester stepped out. He strode down the hall toward her, smiling with that sweet lethal tenderness, that engulfing, crushing love so palpable she could literally feel it swirling around her.

  Kate let him approach. Pleased by her quiescence, Forrester opened his arms and she felt him enfold her like a huge bell jar of ice.

  Then she bolted for the stairwell door at the other end of the corridor. Halfway down the hall she turned and ran into her own apartment. She was inside for no longer than a second, after which she stepped back into the hall again, closing the door.

  It worked. The hall was empty and she heard the pipes of her apartment clang at his sudden presence. Nora had said that ghosts were stupid. Cunning but stupid.

  She skidded and stumbled three flights down the stairwell, then ducked into the first-floor door, almost bowling over an elderly man and woman in jogging shorts. Her plan was to get into the car garage somehow, while he was still floating around in the building.

  Down the first-floor hall, she
could glimpse the front door leading to the parking lot. As she watched, Daniel Forrester stepped into the lobby.

  Again reflexes carried Kate to the stairwell. One more flight down would bring her to her car. The elevators opened again and out came a group of people, blocking Forrester’s view of her as she pushed open the door.

  He wants me with him. He’s going to kill me.

  At the foot of the last flight of stairs, Kate skidded over the concrete step and hit the floor, hip first, the overnight bag sliding forward. A man was just coming in from the garage. He helped her to her feet. “What happened?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” replied Daniel Forrester coming down the stairs from the first floor, his face looking at them in polite concern. “Is she all right?”

  Kate screamed. She tore free of the man’s hands and ran through the garage door. Then, to his total astonishment, she ran back into the stairwell again.

  He followed her gaze up the stairs. The stranger was gone. The man said, “What happened to him?”

  “Look in the garage,” sobbed Kate. “Tell me if you see him.”

  “What’s going on here . . .”

  “Oh, please . . . please . . .”

  “He didn’t walk past me, he must have . . .”

  “Please!”

  The Samaritan shrugged, opened the garage door, and looked round at the hundred or so cars lined up inside. “Nope,” he said. “All clear.”

  Kate pushed past him, pausing only long enough to give him a peck on the cheek, and ran over the greasy concrete to her car parked against the wall. The place smelled of dust, oil, and stale exhausts. The lighting was dim and her footsteps made clattering noises.

  Then she saw Daniel Forrester walking along at the other end of the garage, close by the ramp leading outside, his face peering in the windshields. With a roar, a station wagon turned into the ramp, wheels squeaking on the slippery concrete. The lights flashed over Daniel Forrester’s form.

  Kate hit the dirty concrete, smack in a puddle of dried oil, and rolled under the wheels of a van. After a moment, the station wagon’s engine shut off, the doors slammed, and the passengers walked through the door into the building.

  It was Sunday night and the traffic in and out was heavy, but she could hear Daniel Forrester. There seemed to be hundreds of him, skittering all over the garage like rats. Once his feet passed in front of the van. He moved like swirling paper, his passage causing drafts of cold air and musical knockings on metal; he filled the garage with sound and presence like a flock of flapping birds.

  Dear God, she was going mad. He could find her within seconds.

  Intermixed with Forrester’s noises was the sound of car engines whining and stopping, of wheels rolling to and fro over the concrete, and of doors slamming. She distinguished the sounds of the ghost from those of the vehicles. Sometimes Daniel Forrester was the sound of walking feet, and sometimes he was odd, meaningless noises like marbles rolling over a wooden floor. And still people came and went in the garage, oblivious to the miracle fluttering round the place with them.

  On both sides of her, feet clacked up to the van. The vehicle vibrated as doors opened and shut. Kate covered her hair and tried to flatten herself against the concrete as the whole world ignited with a roar, a hot burst of exhaust-laden air, and the grinding whine of the driveshaft spinning over her head, blowing bits of rust and grit into her hair. With a squeak of tires, the van rolled over her head and turned into the lane leading to the ramp, leaving her naked and exposed like a pinned bug on the concrete.

  The van passed a sports car coming into the space, which gave her a chance to peep over a roof of a car and determine that, at this second anyway, Forrester was not in the garage. He could be on the moon. More likely, he was fumbling around inside the building. Kate dashed two aisles over to her own machine.

  By the time she got it started, he was visible again, standing at the ramp entrance. She put the car in gear, pulled out into the aisle, and turned toward the exit.

  Two more cars were coming in. Forrester stepped away from the entrance. She felt a jolt of freezing cold as she passed through the exit onto the drive in front of the buildings.

  In the rearview mirror, she could clearly see him walking through the front door of the building as she headed toward Venice. Once she was safe in the river of cars thundering north, she allowed pity to seep into her consciousness. Daniel Forrester was dead; a sad fact worth a few tears over the steering wheel. She remembered the night he saw the double image of himself in the mirror and the fear he had tried to hide at this premonition. It had been true after all. Some window of the future had opened and she had laughed it off. Probably she would have anyway had she known it was true. He had been a good companion, friend, and tender lover, she was glad she had known him; she hoped that whatever his shortcomings, his death had been an easy one.

  In Malibu she pulled over to a gas station and used a pay phone to get the number of the clinic in Clayton. Dutton had been the black-bearded doctor whom Forrester had chased out of the lodge. After much pleading from Kate, the reluctant nurse told her Dutton was no longer there. Kate wrote down Bickel’s number in Denver and called him. She told Bickel only her name and that she had to speak to Dutton about a mutual acquaintance named Daniel Forrester. Then she continued on her way north toward Santa Barbara on one last piece of unfinished business. George Hadley.

  CHAPTER 14

  “Dutton? It’s Bickel. I’ve been trying to get you for fifteen minutes.”

  “I just got in,” replied Dutton, setting the oscilloscope on the motel chair. “What’s up?”

  “I got a couple of phone calls. One was from the Clayton clinic, a nurse named Handel? She said some guy came in looking for you. He scared the devil out of her and she told him you were at Cal Tech.”

  “Oh, shit.” Dutton had been sitting down. Now Bickel’s words galvanized him to his feet again. With the phone hunched in his shoulder, he tossed his toilet case into the open suitcase and closed it. “I’m on my way.”

  “Hold it a second, Dutton. That’s one. Number two, I got a phone call a few minutes ago from a girl who was trying to find you. She said it was a personal matter about you and Daniel Forrester. Her name was Kate. Something tells me she’s alive, too.”

  Hearing that announcement, Dutton felt a tremendous surge of energy, composed of equal parts of hope, happiness, and a streak of lust. It was the girl in the ski lodge with the fey smile and hollow cheeks, whom that sonofabitch Forrester had yanked right out from under him. Thinking about her nearly had him cracking his knuckles. And on top of that thought, an even bigger one came tumbling out of the blocked trapdoor where his mind used to be.

  “Jesus, Bickel, that’s where he’s been when he wasn’t at the house or the clinic. I’ll bet he’s been after her. You should’ve seen how he looked at her that night.”

  “Now, don’t be a bitch, Dutton, what are you talking about?”

  Dutton paced the room with the phone to his ear. The more he thought about it, the more it fit into the puzzle. Wasn’t love supposed to survive death with the same willful, anarchic power as hatred? Did it not spring from the same well of the human psyche as all the other furies that drove Daniel Forrester? It all made Kate a likely target for a visitation by him.

  “Bickel, Bickel, Bickel,” he repeated over and over again, thinking hard. “Here’s the situation, I’m taking off from here, I’ll call you tomorrow. If she calls, tell her I’ll be in . . .”

  “Try Las Vegas,” said Bickel.

  “Vegas! Why Vegas?”

  “I have my reasons. Get going, Dutton, stay in touch.” Bickel hung up on him.

  Dutton latched his suitcase and contemplated the oscilloscope. Should he even bother with the damned thing? He was certain it would never work, that it was another crackpot invention with great premise like ingenious potato pee
lers and automatic shoelace-lacing machines. It looked pretty shabby, too, with its strapped-on cartridges, dented casing, and scratched screen, dozens of dents and nicks where Jones had taken out old parts and put in new ones. Dutton switched it on.

  Across the plastic face spewed brain wave static. The tape clicked and hissed as it rotated. So this was how Jones was going to change the world—with a glorified idiot box and a bunch of cockamamie theories of life after death.

  The static vanished as though wiped off by an invisible rag. From the speaker came a faint peep. Then the green line bisected the round screen and bunched upwards in the center into the conical sine wave.

  Dutton looked around the room as the light dimmed to a feeble yellow and cold flowed in from the walls. The telephone rang with a grating electrified jangle.

  “This is the front desk, Dr. Dutton . . . Christ, the phones are lousy . . . I don’t know what to make of this, but this really peculiar guy was here looking for you . . .” Dutton dropped the telephone and stepped backwards, mouth open in frozen horror.

  Fronting the parking area was a window covered with cheap, plastic curtains. The folds of the curtains merged with a swirling, Spanish design of abstract patterns. A face was forming out of these curtain patterns as the room light dimmed, a face barely distinguishable from the design, but for the blond hair clashing with the black lines and the moving lips growling, “Dutton, Dutton, Dutton . . .”

  Dutton left the suitcase and grabbed the oscilloscope. He made it out the door as a torso with shoulders was forming below the talking face and found himself in the parking area.

  Come on now, Larry old boy, don’t think of what he can do, think of what he can’t do. He can be fooled.

  Dutton realized he could not use his own car. Forrester knew it from the clinic. He’d have to steal another one somehow.

  A bearded man with a wide-brimmed hat, cutoff denim vest, and boots was taking out his keys next to a pickup truck. Dutton could smell beer as he approached him.

  “How you doing?” the man jovially hiccuped.