‘Charlie! What the Sam Hill has gotten into you, you stupid mutt?’
But even though Wilbert pulled Charlie’s leash in shorter and shorter, until he was making a high-pitched strangling sound, Charlie continued to spin around and throw himself furiously at the woman in the hat, his eyes bulging and his mottled tongue hanging out.
‘Charlie! You behave yourself!’ Wilbert snapped at him, and whipped the terrier’s nose with the end of his leash. But Charlie was beyond all control now, and flecks of foam were flying from between his lips. Jim had never seen a dog in such a frenzy, even a rabid pit bull that had terrorized West Grove Community College for over an hour before the dog catchers finally arrived.
What was so extraordinary, though, was that Wilbert himself obviously couldn’t see the woman at all, and had no idea why Charlie was jumping and spinning and frothing at the mouth.
‘Wilbert!’ Jim shouted. ‘Wilbert! It’s Jim Rook! Get Charlie away from there, as quick as you can!’
Wilbert looked up. He couldn’t see Jim at first, but then Jim waved at him with both hands. ‘Get Charlie away from there, Wilbert! Otherwise he’s going to get himself hurt!’
Wilbert called back, ‘I can’t work out what’s wrong with him, Jim! He’s just gone crazy!’
‘Get him away!’ Jim repeated. ‘There’s something there that’s driving him out of his mind!’
Wilbert tried to drag Charlie further up the road, but Charlie kept hurling himself up at the woman in the hat and snapping at her as if he were trying to pull off her hat and her veil.
‘What the hell is it?’ shouted Wilbert. ‘Why is he acting this way?’
Charlie jumped up again, but this time the woman in the hat caught his collar. He made a noise that sounded like a scream, and thrashed from side to side, but the woman held him high up in the air in her right hand, and lifted her veil with her left.
Wilbert took two or three staggering steps back, and dropped Charlie’s leash. To him, it must have appeared that Charlie was suspended in mid-air, supported by nothing but his trailing leash, like a bizarre version of the Indian rope trick.
‘Wilbert!’ Jim bellowed at him. ‘For Christ’s sake, grab his leash and pull him away!’
But Wilbert was too stunned to do anything except stumble further back. As he did so, he lost his footing and fell heavily on to the tarmac, so that his heavy black eyeglasses flew off. ‘Hold on!’ Jim shouted, then ran along the landing and hurtled down the steps. He ran along the next landing, and then the next, and as he ran past Mrs LaFarge’s front door she opened it up, her hair all pinned up in curlers, and said, ‘Jee-yum? What in heaven’s name is happening out here?’
Jim ran across the road but he was seconds too late. The woman in the hat ducked her head forward and Jim thought he glimpsed a long, fox-like snout. He heard a sharp, decisive crunch, and then Charlie’s body dropped with a thump on to the road, right next to Wilbert’s eyeglasses.
The woman dropped her veil and Jim heard another crunch, and then another, and then she whirled around with a slithery noise from her gray silk robe, and she was gone, as if she had never been there.
‘Oh, Jesus,’ wept Wilbert. ‘Oh, Jesus, what’s happened? Charlie! Look at Charlie! Jesus, Jim, he doesn’t have a head!’
Wilbert crawled across the road on his hands and knees. He picked up his eyeglasses and put them on, even though the lenses were spattered with blood. Charlie was lying on his side. He was still wearing his collar, but his head had gone, leaving nothing but an inch of bloody windpipe. Wilbert reached out for him, but then he lifted up both hands in despair and disgust.
‘I don’t understand it. What’s happened to him? Where’s his head?’
Jim said, ‘Come inside, Wilbert. We’ll call the police.’
‘No, no. I don’t want to leave him here on his own, I can’t! Poor little guy. He never did no harm to nobody.’
‘OK, then. I’ll go up to my apartment and call the police while you stay here. But be careful. We don’t want the same thing happening to you.’
Wilbert was too shocked and distressed to answer. He knelt in the road, rocking backward and forward, with tears sliding down his cheeks. ‘Poor little Charlie. I don’t understand it. Poor little guy.’
Jim ran up the steps to his apartment. Panting, he went through to the kitchen, lifted the phone off the wall and punched out 911.
‘What’s your emergency, please?’
‘My neighbor’s dog has been killed.’
‘Your neighbor’s dog has been killed? Was it hit by a car?’
‘No. It was decapitated. Right in the middle of the street.’
‘Decapitated?’
‘Beheaded. Something took his head off.’
‘What, exactly?’
‘I don’t know. I really couldn’t tell you.’ A spirit. A demon. A woman who can turn into a fox-monster.
‘OK, sir. We’ll try to get somebody out to see you. Can you give me your name and address, please?’
Jim told her. Then he hung up the phone, feeling both frightened and stupid. He couldn’t possibly explain to the police that Charlie had been beheaded by a demon, especially since Wilbert hadn’t been able to see it – or her, or whatever it was.
He went back outside. When he looked down from the landing, however, he couldn’t see Wilbert. Oh, shit, he thought. Don’t say that the demon has come back and taken him, too. He hurried down the steps and across the road. There was no sign of Wilbert anywhere, and there was no sign of Charlie, either. There was no splatter of blood on the tarmac, either.
Jim looked around. The trees and the bushes were churning in the breeze, and a fine flurry of dust stung his eyes.
‘Wilbert!’ he shouted. ‘Wilbert, where the hell are you? Wilbert!’
Damn it. He should have insisted that Wilbert come up to his apartment with him when he called 911. Now he would not only have to explain what had happened to the police, he would also have to explain it to Dorothy, Wilbert’s wife. Or widow, as she probably was now.
He was still standing there when he heard somebody call out, ‘Hi, Jim!’ Out of the shadows and the whirling yucca leaves came Wilbert, trudging up the curve. Beside him, on his leash, trotted Charlie.
Jim said, ‘Wilbert! Are you OK?’
Wilbert stopped and stared at him through his thick-rimmed eyeglasses. ‘Sure, I’m fine! The old thrombophlebitis cleared up. How are things with you? New semester started yet?’
Charlie approached Jim and started sniffing at his feet. Wilbert tugged him back on his leash and said, ‘Charlie! That’s impolite!’
‘You’re OK, though?’ Jim asked him. ‘And Charlie – he’s OK, too?’
‘Sure,’ said Wilbert, cautiously, as if he suspected that Jim might have had one too many Fat Tires. ‘We’re just taking our evening constitutional, that’s all. Well, I call it our evening constipational, because Charlie never manages to do what he’s supposed to, do you, Charlie?’
Charlie looked up at him with his bulging Boston terrier eyes and barked.
‘Fine, OK then,’ said Jim. ‘Have a good evening, won’t you? And give my best wishes to Dorothy.’
Wilbert and Charlie continued to walk up the road. Charlie kept turning his head around to look back at Jim, and Wilbert had to tug on his leash to keep him going. Well, thought Jim, at least he still has a head. The question was, for how much longer? Just because he was still alive now, that didn’t mean that he wouldn’t be killed tomorrow, or the day after, the same as Tibbles. The days were overlapping and repeating themselves but who could tell which day was which, or whether any of these grisly events would really happen? Maybe they were nothing but a threat. But a threat of what?
It was past midnight when the police arrived. When the bell rang, he opened his door and was confronted by a huge female officer with sandy hair and freckles who was almost four inches taller than he was. She shone a flashlight into his face and said, ‘Mr Jim Rook? You reported that your neighbor’s
dog had been killed.’
‘I’m sorry. Yes. I made a mistake. Sorry. I should have called you.’
The officer opened her notebook. ‘You reported that the dog had been beheaded? Is that right?’
‘I made a mistake. I looked down from my landing here and saw my neighbor walking his dog up the road and it was just a trick of the light. The shadows, you know. It looked like the dog had lost its head.’
‘But it was still walking up the road?’
‘Well, yes.’
‘Wouldn’t that have indicated to you that it probably still had its head on?’
‘I told you. It was an optical illusion. I made a mistake.’
The officer looked at Jim for a long time. From the expression on her face, Jim had the distinct feeling that she would happily have seized him by the neck and lifted him clear off the floor.
‘Sir,’ she said, ‘have you been drinking?’
‘Only a couple of beers, that’s all.’
‘Well, I suggest that next time you have a couple of beers you go to bed and sleep it off and don’t waste our time with your optical illusions. OK? Otherwise we might feel it necessary to take you down to the drunk tank, and I promise you that’s no illusion.’
‘Yes, Officer. My apologies.’
The policewoman left and Jim went back into his living room. For some reason, he had never felt so lonely in his life. He had dozens of friends and casual acquaintances. He rubbed along pretty well with almost the entire college faculty, except for Phil Magruder the English chair who was narrow-chested and always wore a bow-tie and kept an empty pipe clenched between his teeth as if he were one of the literati. Sheila Colefax had even invited him to a feminist poetry reading, hadn’t she? Or else she was about to. But he had never felt so keenly that his ability to see ghosts and demons and other supernatural presences had set him so much apart. It didn’t help that Tibbles was dead, and that he had killed him.
Eventually, at 1:30 in the morning, he grew so tired that he crawled into bed, and dragged the red Zuni bedcover over his face. At first he found it difficult to sleep, and rolled himself from one side of the bed to the other, winding himself up in the bedcover tighter and tighter until he looked like a huge red chrysalis.
He recited Walt Whitman to himself. Not the slogan on his T-shirt – ‘Nothing can happen more beautiful than death’ – which was a famous Walt Whitman quote, but the poem about the child who went forth every day ‘and the first object he look’d upon, that object he came, that object became part of him for the day, or a certain part of the day, or many years, or stretching cycles of years.’
He slept. He didn’t dream, or if he did, he wasn’t aware of dreaming. But then he heard a shifting, scratching noise, and he woke up instantly, listening. He lay there for nearly a minute, in the darkness, his heart slowly thumping. He tried to untangle himself from the bedcover but he was twisted up in it so tightly that he could barely move. Eventually, he managed to roll over and pull himself free, and sit up.
He didn’t ask if there was anybody in the room with him. He knew that there couldn’t be. The front door was double-locked and chained, the balcony window was locked. But he was sure that he had heard scratching, and rustling, and when he listened harder, he was sure that he could hear breathing, too. Quick, furtive breathing that was actually more like an animal panting.
He reached across to the night-stand and switched on the light. Almost instantly, the bulb popped, and he was in darkness again. But not before he had seen that she was standing at the end of his bed, in her Puritan-style hat and her veil and her silky gray robe.
He didn’t shout out. He didn’t challenge her. He tumbled off the bed and wrenched open the bedroom door and ran down the hallway and pulled back the chain and opened the front door and sprinted along the landing and catapulted himself down the steps. He reached Summer’s door and pressed the bell and hammered on the window with his fists.
‘Summer! Summer! You have to let me in! Summer!’
At first there was no answer. Oh God, don’t tell me she’s pole-dancing all night, or a customer has taken her back to his place for some extra-curricular fun and games. He was sure he could hear the rustling of silk along the landing above him, and the scratching of claws.
‘Summer! For Christ’s sake, Summer, let me in!’
TEN
There was no alternative. He would have go downstairs and seek refuge with Mrs LaFarge. But just as he was making his way back along the landing, Summer’s door opened up and she appeared, her hair tousled, blinking. She was wearing nothing but a red sleeveless T-shirt and a white thong.
‘Jimmy?’ she said in a foggy voice. ‘What time is it, Jimmy? What’s going on?’
‘Is it OK if I come in?’ Jim asked her. ‘I don’t want to impose on you, but it’s back. That thing that made me scream last night.’
‘Jimmy . . . you had a nightmare last night. It wasn’t a thing.’
‘Summer, please let me in. I swear to you that it wasn’t a nightmare. It was an actual thing. And tonight it’s come back.’
‘OK,’ said Summer. ‘But you can’t do this every night, Jimmy. Now I have this job I really need my sleep. You think that pole-dancing is like falling off a log? Pole-dancing is very exhausting.’
‘Just tonight, please,’ said Jim. ‘I promise you I’ll sort it all out tomorrow.’
Summer said, ‘OK, sure,’ and opened the door wider so that he could come in. He had never been inside her apartment before. The living room had purple-painted walls and a white leather couch and a coffee table in the shape of a Spanish guitar. Over the fireplace hung a large poster for a Prince ‘Purple Rain’ concert, with the Purple One himself sitting astride a motorcycle.
‘You need a drink or anything?’ asked Summer.
‘No, really, I’m fine. I’ll just crash on the couch if that’s OK.’
‘Oh, don’t be insane. Come to bed. You’re not going to jump on me, are you?’
‘Summer, the couch is perfectly OK, I promise you.’
‘It’s all leathery. I wouldn’t sleep on it. Come to bed.’
Jim followed her into the bedroom. The bed was a king-sized four-poster, with a purple satin quilt and a purple velour headboard. Jim thought it looked as if Summer had bought it second-hand from an Elvis impersonator. At the far end of the bedroom there was a dressing table with a triple mirror, crowded with dozens of half-used lipsticks and countless pots of moisturizing cream and eyelash tongs and squeezed-out tubes of blusher. Surrounded by all this chaos sat a stunned-looking teddy bear in a purple rollneck sweater.
Jim looked around. The bedroom walls were clustered with all kinds of souvenirs and oddities, like Venetian carnival masks and drinking horns and mirrors with frames made out of seashells.
The bedroom smelled strongly of some industrial-strength perfume, which Jim couldn’t identify, but he could tell that it had musk in it, and bergamot. If he had been asked to give it a name, he would have called it Democrat Congressman’s Mistress’s Boudoir.
Summer bounced into bed and patted the quilt next to her. ‘Come on. We don’t have all night.’
Jim sat down on the side of the bed and said, ‘You’re sure about this?’
‘Jimmy, you’re a college teacher. If I can’t trust you, who can I trust?’
‘OK,’ he said. ‘So long as you’re sure.’
He swung his legs around and pulled up the quilt to cover himself. Summer switched off her bedside lamp and they lay side by side in darkness. Outside, the wind continued to whistle and fluff, and somewhere a wind chime was jingling wildly, as if hundreds of Buddhist monks were hurrying down the road with their tingsha cymbals.
After a long while, Summer turned toward Jim and said, ‘Are you asleep, Jimmy?’
‘Nearly,’ he told her. Then, ‘No.’
‘So what is it, this thing that you’re so scared of?’
‘You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.’
‘Try me. My last
boyfriend said that I would believe anything.’ She paused, and then she said, ‘He was right, I guess. I truly believed that he wasn’t cheating on me with that fat Mexican waitress.’
Jim said, ‘The thing is, Summer, I can see all kinds of stuff that other people can’t see. I nearly died when I was a kid, and ever since then I’ve been able to see ghosts, and spirits, and demons.’
‘You’re kidding me! You’re kidding me, right? Like Ghost Whisperer?’
‘Not really. Not at all, in fact. Ghosts and spirits usually hang around because they have a bone to pick with somebody who’s still alive, or else they don’t realize that they’re dead, so most of them are either vindictive or stupid.’
‘You’re kidding me, though, aren’t you? Come on – you can really see ghosts? What do they look like?’
‘Pretty much like they did when they were alive. Less substantial, I guess. The only difference is, nobody can see them. Except me, of course, although I’m sure there must be at least a handful of other people who have the same ability.’
‘But that thing in your apartment?’
‘That’s not a ghost, that’s a demon. When it first appeared last night, it looked like a woman in a black hat and a veil. But it grew bigger and bigger, until it looked like some enormous kind of animal, like a wolf or a fox.’
‘You are kidding me, aren’t you? I mean, you’re just saying this to scare me, like one of those campfire stories.’
Jim shook his head, although he knew that she couldn’t see him in the darkness. ‘I think it’s a Korean demon, and that one of my new students is involved with it somehow. Maybe he brought it here. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Maybe the demon has taken control of the student and is using him as kind of a front man.’
‘So – let me get this straight – upstairs in your apartment – there’s an actual real actual demon?’
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