Jim was still standing by the railing when Tibbles appeared out of the front door, and rubbed himself against his legs.
‘Hey, there you are,’ said Jim, and lifted him up. ‘I was worried that I might have had some kind of hallucination, and that you were still, like, deceased.’
Tibbles stared at him with his green eyes very wide, which Jim took to mean that he forgave him for running him down. Or not. He never quite knew, with Tibbles. But then Tibbles licked his lips, and started to make a rattling noise like the air-conditioning, which meant that he was hungry.
‘You know something?’ Jim told him. ‘Even for a cat you’re a blatant hypocrite. What do you want? Chicken, chicken liver, tuna or turkey? I’m all out of shrimp, and besides that I can’t stand the stink.’
He carried Tibbles back into the kitchen and dropped him on to the floor. It was then that he saw that the kitchen sink was crowded with dirty dishes – a large white dinner plate; a side plate; two saucepans, one with a question-mark of spaghetti still clinging to the inside and the other crusted with lava-like rings of Bolognese sauce; a dessert bowl with caramel-colored circles all around it; a coffee mug; two wine glasses; and a cheese-grater that was sprouting shreds of waxy-looking cheese.
Jim approached the sink very slowly. He picked up the saucepan that had been used to cook Bolognese sauce, and then put it down again. This was insane. These were the dirty dishes that had been left over from the supper that he had cooked himself last night. He had eaten it in the couch while watching CSI: New York. Tibbles had been staring at him fixedly the whole time he was eating because Tibbles had a most un-cat-like penchant for Bolognese sauce, even when it was so hot that that he had to cool it off by batting lumps of it around the kitchen floor with his paws.
What was insane, though, was that Jim had washed up all of these dishes. The plates, the saucepans, the glasses, the cutlery, everything. He had washed them all up and dried them and put them back in the cupboards and shelves and drawers where they belonged.
He checked his watch. It was 8:09 p.m., on the evening of September 7. Yesterday, when he had cooked and eaten his spaghetti Bolognese, it had been September 6. So this wasn’t yesterday. Not according to his watch, anyhow.
He went into the living room and switched on the TV. He changed the channel to K-Cal 9 and the dateline on that, too, was September 7. Letitia Brown was announcing that a forty-two-year-old Caucasian man had been found in Covina, minus his head. Only two hours later, a disembodied head had been discovered six miles away, in Glendora, but it was that of a twenty-nine-year-old African-American woman. One head, one body, but they didn’t match.
Jim looked down at Tibbles, who was still expectantly licking his lips. ‘What the hell is going on here, Tibbles? You saw me wash those dishes. You saw me tidy everything up before I left. Who’s been here? Who’s been sleeping in my bed?’ He paused, and then he said, ‘Jesus. I sound like Goldilocks.’
Tibbles, of course, said nothing. Jim opened up a can of organic chicken for him and spooned it into his bowl. Then, tired as he was, he lifted all of the dishes out of the kitchen sink, filled it with hot water, and started to wash up.
When he had finished, he took a bottle of Fat Tire out of the fridge and sat down on the couch, but he kept the television on mute. Since it was the first day of the new semester, and the first day was always bruising, he had been planning to reward himself this evening with a takeout Japanese supper from Murakami, maybe some sashimi and some braised pork belly in shoyu broth, which was his favorite. But he didn’t feel at all hungry any more. He felt disoriented and anxious and as mashed-up inside as Tibbles had been this morning, when he had run him over.
He was one hundred per cent certain that he had washed up those dishes. He was equally sure that he had meticulously tidied his bed. But if somebody else had been here, who the hell was it, and how had he found the time to cook himself spaghetti Bolognese and eat it and sleep for long enough to mess up the bed and take a shower, too? And how had he managed to sneak out of his apartment without Jim catching even a glimpse of him?
Jim was still sitting with his head bowed in front of the silent television when there was a buzz at his front door. He waited for almost half a minute, but then there was another buzz, and another. He cursed under his breath, put down his bottle of beer and shuffled out into the hallway.
‘Who is it?’ he called out.
‘It’s me, Jee-yum! C’est moi! I brought a little treat for our miracle cat!’
He opened the door. It was Mrs LaFarge, wrapped up in a black candlewick robe, with a floppy hood and black sunglasses, so that she looked like the Wicked Witch of the West. She was holding a Tupperware box which contained something dark and bloody. Behind her, out in the night, the trees were surging like the ocean.
‘Chopped chicken livers,’ she said triumphantly. ‘I know how much he loves them.’
‘You do?’
‘Well, of course. I always save him a few morsels whenever I’m making my liver pâté.’
Tibbles appeared, with his tail waving, and gave Mrs LaFarge a sweet, ingratiating mew. ‘Here, Tibbles!’ said Mrs LaFarge. ‘Look what your marraine has brought for you! Foies de poulet, you lucky cat! You very lucky cat!’
‘Mrs LaFarge . . .’ Jim began.
‘Pssh!’ said Mrs LaFarge. ‘It is nothing at all. C’est rien. He has been smiled upon by God, and he deserves a treat. All I can say is, it’s a pity about the funeral. I love a funeral, don’t you? It does one so much good to cry.’
‘Mrs LaFarge—’
‘Pssh! When you came down this afternoon and told me that Tibbles had come back to life, I was so delighted. You are right, Jim. It is a miracle. And as you said, who are we to question things that we do not really understand, nor have any hope of understanding?’
Jim said, very slowly, ‘I came down this afternoon and told you that Tibbles had come back to life?’
Mrs LaFarge took off her sunglasses, and prodded Jim with her finger. ‘Don’t pretend that you have forgotten already! What a joker you are! I don’t know why you didn’t tell me when you first brought him home in that basket. I know you were still worried that he might not survive, but you could have told me!’
She bent forward and tickled Tibbles under the chin. ‘I am his godmother, after all, am I not? His marraine?’
SIX
After Mrs LaFarge had left, Jim closed his front door and stood with his back to it for a few moments, holding the Tupperware box of chopped chicken livers. Tibbles came up to him and stared at him.
‘So, Tibs – you were here this afternoon,’ said Jim. ‘When exactly did I come home and go downstairs and tell Mrs LaFarge about your miraculous resurrection? I distinctly recall that I was at college all afternoon. I was conducting a class on the incomprehensible musings of Michael McClure. How could I have come back here?’
Tibbles continued to stare at him. Then, after a while, he turned away, went back into the living room, and jumped up on to the couch.
Jim found a space in the fridge for the Tupperware box. He felt light-headed and swimmy, as if he were drunk, or as if he had been smoking something that he had confiscated from one of his students. He had asked Mrs LaFarge when he had come down to tell her about Tibbles, and she had insisted that it was two thirty-five, give or take a minute or two, because she had just started watching Guiding Light.
‘You’re sure it was then?’ Jim had repeated. ‘You’re absolutely sure?’
‘Of course I am sure. I never miss one moment of Guiding Light, but your news was much more important. Your news was like a message from heaven.’
‘And you’re sure it was me?’
‘Oh, you are always teasing me, Jim.’
He went into the living room and picked up the phone. He had written the number of Cedars-Sinai emergency room on the back of a folded envelope. He dialed it, and waited while it rang.
‘I didn’t come back here this afternoon,’ he told Tibbles. ‘All
right, I have this gift, I can see ghosts and stuff. But I can’t be in two places at the same time.’
Tibbles was already asleep, but he wouldn’t have answered him, even if he had been awake.
‘Emergency Room, can I help you?’
‘Oh, yes. My name is Jim Rook. I’m a member of the faculty at West Grove Community College, and I’m enquiring about a student of mine, Maria Lopez. She was taken into the ER around four o’clock this afternoon.’
‘Maria Lopez?’
‘Yes, I’m her English teacher. She had an accident and got herself pretty badly cut up. I’m just wondering how she is.’
‘Wait up a moment, please.’
Jim waited and waited. He could hear ambulance sirens in the background, and somebody shouting. Then the receptionist picked up the phone again and said, ‘You’re sure she was brought to Cedars-Sinai?’
‘Absolutely. That’s what the paramedics told me. I sent her mother there, too.’
‘Well, I’m sorry, Mr Rook, there is nobody of that name here.’
‘Are you quite sure about that? Maybe she was registered under another name. She’s Hispanic, aged seventeen. She had lacerations and bruises all over.’
‘No, sir, we have received no admissions of that description, not today. Two young Hispanic boys with serious knife-wounds, that’s all.’
‘OK, thanks.’
Jim hung up. This didn’t make any kind of sense at all. He was sure that the paramedics had told him that they were taking Maria to Cedars-Sinai. But maybe they had decided to take her to another hospital which was closer, or which specialized in reconstructive surgery, or which would take her in if she was uninsured.
He found the card that Lieutenant Harris had given him and called Detective Wong. It took the detective nearly a half-minute to answer, and when he did his voice echoed as if he were sitting in the men’s room.
‘Detective Wong? This is Jim Rook, from West Grove Community College.’
‘Who?’
‘Jim Rook. We met this afternoon, when Maria Lopez got herself hurt.’
‘Who?’
‘Maria Lopez. The girl who got herself all cut up.’
‘I’m sorry, Mr Whatever-your-name-is—’
‘Rook. Like in the bird.’
‘Well, I’m sorry Mr Rook-like-in-the-bird, I don’t have the least idea what you’re talking about.’
‘Didn’t you come out to West Grove this afternoon, with your partner? What’s her name, Detective Madison? Lieutenant Harris was there, too. One of my students was seriously hurt, Maria Lopez. Either somebody attacked her, or she got herself caught up in some kind of machinery.’
There was a lengthy pause, accompanied by a hollow rattle which sounded like a toilet-roll. Then Detective Wong said, ‘No, sir. I wasn’t called out to any incident like that, not today. I was catching up on paperwork for most of the afternoon.’
‘You are Detective Wong who has a red and green plaid coat?’
‘That’s right. But I absolutely did not come out to West Grove Community College this afternoon and I know nothing at all about any Maria Lopez.’
Jim couldn’t think what else to say. He hung up the phone and stood in the middle of the living room feeling as if he were going mad. He almost felt like banging his head against the wall, just to prove to himself that he wasn’t having a nightmare.
‘Come on, Jim,’ he told himself. ‘There has to be some explanation for this.’
He rummaged under the couch and pulled out a dog-eared copy of the yellow pages. Then he picked up the phone again and called every hospital with an emergency room within a twenty-mile radius – starting with Kaiser Permanente on Sunset Boulevard and then working his way through Santa Monica Medical Clinic, Glendale Memorial, and even the Brotman in Culver City.
He located a Susanna Lopez, who had suffered third-degree burns in an auto wreck on the Hollywood Freeway. He also found a Michael Lopez, who worked at B&B Lumber in North Hollywood and had cut off his thumb and two fingers with a circular saw. Then he discovered a Dorothea Lopez, who had suffered a heart attack at her home in Boyle Heights, and fallen downstairs, breaking her hip. But after ringing round eleven hospitals, he could find no trace of any Maria Lopez.
He thought of calling Dr Ehrlichman, but by now it was nearly midnight, and what could Dr Ehrlichman do? Even if he knew where Maria had been taken, he would be majorly ratty at being disturbed so late, and if he didn’t know any more about Maria than Detective Wong did, or the emergency department at Cedars-Sinai, he would think that Jim was finally ready for the nuthouse.
Jim opened the fridge and took out another bottle of Fat Tire. It was his last, so he would have to buy more tomorrow. Maybe he should give it up. Maybe it contained some secret ingredient that gave him hallucinations, because right there on the shelf in front of him was the Tupperware box full of chopped chicken livers, and that was incontrovertible proof that somebody had told Mrs LaFarge that Tibbles had been resurrected. Somebody who looked like him. Somebody who knew what he knew. Somebody, for all he knew, who was him. A doppelgänger.
While he drank his beer, he switched on his laptop and Googled Kwisin. There were very few references to it (or her, or whatever she was.) But he came across a PDF of a memoir entitled Folk-tales and Mysticism in Korea, written in the 1950s by an English anthropologist called Peregrine Fellows.
In his chapter on Ghosts And Demons, Fellows had written, ‘Kwisin are the ghosts of women who have not married before their death. They haunt their relatives every night, keening and crying for them to arrange a marriage for them, so that they can find eternal peace. It is said that, occasionally, their relatives manage to effect this, especially if they are able to find a man from a far-off town or village who has not heard of the woman’s passing.
‘For some considerable time after her death, a Kwisin can sustain a physical form, so that she will be indistinguishable to her unsuspecting husband from a living woman. As time goes by, however, she will sleep longer and longer every night until she never wakes at all. She will, however, have found peace in the spirit world.
‘If her relatives fail to marry her, however, she will increasingly take on a demonic shape, such as a dog or a fox or a hawk, and she will take her revenge on a world that has deprived her of happiness and peace by preying on the souls of those who have met a premature death, in particular other unmarried women and those who have died by their own hand.
‘She will deliberately encourage the separation of those couples who are betrothed, by whispering lies to each partner about the other’s faithfulness; and she will deliberately encourage suicides by showing vulnerable and depressive people that their future lives will be filled with nothing but sickness and despair.’
That was all about Kwisin. The rest of the chapter was devoted to ghosts who haunted people who were unwise enough to travel through the mountains at night; and to the ghosts of Sǒn Masters, Zen Buddhist monks who had found a way through to ‘the Great Way that has no gate.’
Jim was too tired to make any sense of the higher concepts of Zen, so he switched off his laptop and snapped it shut. Tibbles had been sleeping and he opened his eyes in annoyance.
Before he went to bed Jim changed the sheets and the pillowslips. Even if the only other person who had slept in them was a double of himself, he didn’t relish the idea of sharing somebody else’s sweaty bedclothes. As he stood in front of the bathroom basin, brushing his teeth, he peered at his reflection intently to make sure that it was really him, but he couldn’t detect any differences from the usual him. No moles, no scars, no additional gray hairs.
It took him over an hour to get to sleep. He kept hearing noises like somebody walking around the living room, and opening the fridge door in the kitchen. Twice he got out of bed to make sure that no intruders had forced their way into his apartment. Both times he found that all the windows were locked and the security chain on the front door was still fastened. Tibbles was still lying on the couch, purrin
g like a death-rattle.
He lay in bed staring at the ceiling. If he had imagined what had happened to Maria Lopez, maybe he had imagined the whole day, from start to finish. Maybe he hadn’t killed Tibbles at all. Maybe he hadn’t gone to college and marked the register. Maybe he had imagined all of those new students – T.D. and Arthur Watt and Janice Sticky and Teddy Greenspan. But how was that possible?
He fell asleep, but after what seemed like only a few minutes he jerked violently and opened his eyes. The digital clock beside his bed said 2:37 a.m. and it was still dark outside. He lay there for a while, listening, wondering what it was that had woken him up. His knees and his elbows ached, and his nose was clogged up, as if he had a cold. He felt cold, too. In fact he was so cold that he was shivering, and he reached down the bed and dragged the red woolen throw up to his neck.
Something was wrong with him. Something was badly wrong. He lifted his head from the pillow and his neck creaked, as if he had been lying in a draft. He didn’t want to get out of bed but he urgently needed to take a leak. He felt that if he didn’t go to the bathroom immediately, he would wet his shorts.
‘Goddammit,’ he cursed under his breath. He tried to swing both of his legs out of bed but his knees hurt him so much that he could only manage one leg at a time. When his feet were on the carpet he heaved himself up and hobbled toward the bathroom door. He felt terrible. Not just aching, but exhausted.
He barely made it to the toilet, but when he did, he managed only three or four spurts. He stood there, waiting, feeling as if he wanted to pee some more, but he simply couldn’t.
He flushed the toilet and went over to the basin to wash his hands. When he saw himself in the mirror, however, his knees gave way, and he had to grab the edge of the basin to stop himself from collapsing on to the floor.
The face in the mirror was that of an elderly man, at least eighty-five years old. His hair was sparse, and what there was of it was wild and white. His eyes were red-rimmed and watery, and his cheeks were sunken. There were deep lines all around his mouth as if his lips had been sewn together by head-hunters. His chin was covered in white stubble, and his neck was wrinkled.
Demon's Door Page 7