by David Nickle
“All right. So what does this have to—”
Ian kept going. “Yeah, so here’s how he describes terror. It’s the cold hand that touches you in the dark. It’s coming home and realizing all the furniture in your house has been replaced by furniture that’s exactly the same. It’s the knowledge that reality is tearing away underneath you. That there’s a dark place underneath it that has nothing to do with you, except that it maybe wants to eat you.
“That, Ann, is the nub of it. It’s more complicated than that. But that is what we all share—and what you and I share too.”
“I don’t think we share anything.”
“Well it may be true that we don’t share the sexual component. If that’s what you’re guessing.”
“Hirsch seemed to think that there was more to poltergeists than sex, though.”
“Yes,” said Rickhardt, “he does. I think it’s fair to say that the American guys like to think about it that way. I think it’s in their national character; they can only enjoy something if they pin it to manifest destiny, divine will. So of course, the ’geists are a gateway to the divine. What else did he tell you?”
“He told me about you,” said Ann. “He said he’d protect me from you.”
Ian smirked. “Those guys can be pretty judgmental down there in the sunshine state. But you knew enough to not fall into his arms, didn’t you?”
“The Insect decided that for me.”
“It made the right choice. They have a place outside of St. Augustine. Visited there once. They were inducing comas at the time. They thought it enhanced things; unleashed the Id or some shit. But it was a bad idea. I don’t think they’re doing that anymore. But still. Nowhere you’d want to go.”
“So terror,” said Ann. “You’re telling me that this is a kink for terror.”
“It sounds so tawdry when you reduce it to that. The Americans take it too far in the other direction, maybe. But there’s a big difference between what we do in these walls . . . and what goes on at a German fetish bar, say. Those people are playing a game, with their leather costumes and safe words.
“We’re doing the real thing, Ann. When we stare into the abyss—it really is staring back.”
“And yet, in the end it simply arouses you sexually.”
“There you go again, being all reductive.”
“Is there a more nuanced way that I should be thinking about this?”
Ian opened his mouth to speak, then shook his head and smiled, a little sheepishly.
“So it’s like really raping children rather than just looking at child pornography,” said Ann, “if you were a pedophile, I mean.”
“A ’geister,” said Ian, not smiling now, “is what I am.”
“That’s a cute name,” said Ann. “But I’m willing to bet that when I came to you ’geisters’ attention, I wasn’t much more than eight years old. Hirsch told me that much . . . that they’d been watching me for some time. And there’s that little girl I met. With what—Mister Sleepy? Tell me—is Dr. Sunderland a ’geister too? I remember that Philip warned me about him. Did he touch
Philip?”
“Wow,” said Ian, “cards on the table.”
Behind him, the sky was lightening. Ann could see it resolving behind the bare branches of the denuded woods around here. The tree branches descended down beneath the floor so it became clear that this wasn’t just a covered walkway between buildings. They were on an enclosed bridge, crossing a ravine.
“He at least worked for you, didn’t he? We thought he was helping us—but he wasn’t, was he?”
“He was helping you,” said Ian. “You either would have burned down your house or been in the nuthatch within a year if you hadn’t gone there. Sunderland put your ’geist, the Insect, someplace safe. Someplace where it couldn’t hurt anybody, and nobody could hurt it.”
“And it worked great.”
“It worked for a long time. We should’ve been following closer. The accident . . . that should’ve tipped us off. But it didn’t fit the profile. So you got away from us for a while.”
“And then—Michael.”
“He was a good kid,” said Ian.
“He was a rapist. A fucking liar,” said Ann.
Ian nodded in agreement. “He was a liar. He had an agenda in your marriage that he didn’t tell you about. But I’ll tell you—he would’ve treated you well, if he’d had the chance.”
“How would that have worked? He’d keep me in white wine and video games upstairs, while he and his friends, what—terrified each other to orgasm in the rumpus room?” Ann shook her head. “Where the hell did you find him, anyway? And did you promise me to him? It really did seem as though we just met, the way . . . you know, normal people meet.”
“Michael I found on the internet,” said Ian. “You think of us as this terrible secret society, and while it’s true that we communicate—really, it’s not a big secret. We’re a community. We have websites and chat rooms just like anybody.”
“How perfectly innocent of you.”
“Well I wouldn’t go that far. But we pay attention to those chatrooms—because that, really, is just the modern variation of how all of us got involved with each other. Me, I was bit old for that. I came to this through EC horror comics, those Warren magazines . . .
Famous Monsters of Film Land. I met people. . . . Well, Michael just signed himself up on “Spectral Women,” and we started up a friendship. Good thing for him, too—he was still in Capetown, and would’ve got himself killed if he stayed there longer.”
“He didn’t speak a lot about South Africa,” said Ann.
“He was taking a lot of risks. His family had a bit of money. His dad was a lawyer, like him. He’d had a post with the government, during Apartheid, gone into practice afterward. They had a nice big house. A compound, really. You could spend your whole life there, not step out at all. Got the sense it was designed for that; Mr. Voors had some enemies. Or at least, he thought he did.”
Ann’s fists clenched, but she kept them at her side. You have some enemies too, Rickhardt. “What risks did he take?” she asked.
“There was something going on around his house—maybe those enemies at work. Michael told me about some experiences he’d had as a little kid. Faces at his windows; cold drafts. It might have been the real thing. It probably was. And it was terrifying. But of course—”
“—he got to like it.”
“He did,” said Ian. “He saw it all as a mystery at first, like he was in one of those boy detective books, where the haunting would turn out to have a perfectly rational explanation for the thing that he saw.”
“What did he see?”
“Would it help you understand if I said Michael saw a beautiful, naked girl?” Ian chuckled. “I don’t know exactly what he saw. I’m sure he didn’t know exactly what he saw. He was only twelve, when he started into it.”
“That’s young,” said Ann, and Ian gave her a look that she couldn’t quite apprehend.
“Ten years later, he could have learned everything he needed to know with a Google search. As it was, he did his work the old-fashioned way. He left the compound. He went to the library. Started asking around. He visited shops. Found out about séances, and covens, and ‘secret ceremonies.’ Got him robbed a couple of times. Could have got him killed, given the times. Finally, years later, he got himself mixed up with a sangoma—a witch doctor, sort of a healer woman. She was a beautiful girl, now. Not much older than him.”
“Did she seduce him?”
“Oh, in a way. But by that time, he’d found the websites—the chatrooms. She was showing him things—and he, the little idiot, was taking pictures and telling stories and bringing them to us, uploading them to a room we had running on GEnie.”
“What?”
“Before your time,” said Rickhardt. “But the point is, they were up there. Where anybody could see. Th
at was when I noticed him. They were real treasures. There was one in particular—of a human femur, dug out of a grave it looked like, floating in the air above a woman, who was floating herself, just a foot off the ground. It was taken in a Capetown slum, in what looked like early morning. The sun made it all golden. I got in touch with him directly, because I wanted to know if it had been manipulated. He offered to show me the negative.”
“Negative?”
“He shot it on film,” said Ian. “No camera phones in those days.”
“That sounds risky,” said Ann, and Ian allowed as it was.
“I tried to steer him away from that—if nothing else, it wasn’t making it any easier with his family, who didn’t like him consorting with the sangoma and her friends, and there was trouble there too. Michael very nearly didn’t make it out of there. Do you know what necklacing is?”
Ann nodded. “Michael told me about it on our first date,” she said. “He didn’t use the term. He just called it a tire thing. But I looked it up.”
Back when that was the worst thing that I thought Michael brought to this relationship.
“Yeah, it’s never far from his mind. You fill up a tire with gasoline, put it around your victim’s neck and light it on fire. Watch him die. It takes a long time.
“They got as far as pouring the gasoline in the tire and putting it over his head, before they let him go. It was a warning. He’d followed his sangoma girl to an exorcism for a little girl. The family had been ANC, during Apartheid, and they were, shall we say, private people. They caught him taking pictures. They wanted to make sure that didn’t happen again, but didn’t quite want to kill him. Still—the display made an impression.”
“He didn’t tell me about that part.”
“Of course he didn’t; he was ashamed of what he did. He was a liar, and he was compelled toward these things . . . the ’geists. That compulsion—we all accept it, but nobody’s proud of it. But he wasn’t some monster. None of us are.” Ian rubbed the back of his neck and looked outside, over Ann’s shoulder. What was he looking for? “Most of what he was, you knew: an immigrant from South Africa who took his law degree at Osgoode and didn’t speak with his father anymore. I sponsored him, and I helped him with his tuition, and he stayed with me in Toronto while he was studying, and he became—yes, like a son to me.”
“And from pretty early on, you had him zeroed in on me.”
“It was all he ever wanted,” said Ian. “He would have treated you well.”
Dawn broke over the woods. It was a winter sky, although winter had not yet come. Ann wondered if it would storm. She thought that it should. Storm had followed her from Alabama, through the midwest and across the border, in hail and rain and funnel clouds. It should be here now.
But there was no storm outside; thin branches reached up from the depths in a deathly stillness. The clouds overhead hung quiet and thin. It all lay beyond clean, dry glass. There were no messages for Ann, or anyone, in this landscape.
Ian was watching the landscape too. In the morning gloom, he seemed hunched, small, and very old. His face was sallow, and dark rings cradled his eyes, which cast over treetops—looking for any sign of life out there. It seemed, for that instant, as though the breath caught in both their throats, each of them trapped in droplets of psychic amber: a kind of limbo. Neither of them wanted to take
a step further. They’d been killing time at the threshold, telling ghost stories about Michael Voors here at the end of the night.
Now the light had come.
Ann imagined them on another bridge—the one that she needed to cross every time she needed to obtain entry to the Insect’s prison. The pallid morning light grew over the ravine, and it seemed as though the treetops themselves sank as the earth distended below them. The plate glass on either side might as well have been open gallery windows, extended from the flagstone floor to the thatch and timber roof, separated by Grecian columns, wrapped in dark ivy. The door at the end was thick oak, bound in iron, held tight by a bar, and twelve sturdy locks. And the light, awful and sickly as it was, filled the hallway here and gave it its name.
The Hallway of Light.
“Ian,” said Ann finally, when her breath found her again, “what’s behind that door?”
“You don’t have to go,” he said, “if you’d rather not.”
“It’s the Insect, right?”
Ian said nothing. He shut his eyes tightly, bit on his lower lip. In the Hallway of Light in her mind, he was a shrivelled gnome, shrinking and crumbling in the sun. Ann studied him.
“Oh my,” she said. “Ian. You’re terrified.”
Ian didn’t answer.
She nodded. “Whatever’s behind that door. It’s as good as it gets for you, isn’t it?”
Ian whispered to himself.
“Well I’m not afraid,” she said, and knocked on the door three times, sharply.
ii
When the door opened, Ann wondered briefly whether the hand that opened it would be human. This time, it was. She recognized its owner immediately.
“I didn’t catch your name back in the orchard,” she said.
Mister Sleepy’s babysitter had changed clothes.
Now he was wearing a crisp white tunic and matching trousers, both made from loose-woven cotton. Ann had seen ensembles like this in Little India on Gerrard Street.
“It’s Peter,” he said. “Hello, Mrs. Voors. Hope you’re feeling refreshed.”
“As you’d expect.”
“Quite,” he said, and looked over to Ian, and nodded. Ian nodded back.
“Well why don’t you come in, Mrs. Voors.”
Peter stepped aside, and beckoned Ann into a small sitting room, with couches like the one Ann had woken up on to either side of the door. Opposite walls had small dark wooden tables underneath mirrors, with table lamps on each.
There were no windows. On the far side of the room, there was another set of doors much like this one. They were propped open, to darkness.
“How’s your little girl?” Ann asked.
“She’s just fine, ma’am. Though as you’ve probably guessed, she’s not my child.”
Ian jumped in: “Peter’s up from Tennessee. With his niece. Isn’t that right?”
“That’s where you’re from,” said Ann. “You probably don’t remember, but you and I met. In Mobile.”
“I reckon we did meet, Mrs. Voors, at least nearly,” said Peter. “Glad you made it here safe.”
Was he glad? Ann had to wonder. He was a southerner: probably one of Rickhardt’s judgemental Americans; maybe from the same little coven that’d spawned John Hirsch. If he’d taken her at the Rosedale Arms, she doubted he’d have brought her here, to Southern Ontario. Assuming he could have wrangled her and the Insect, likely she would have wound up in whatever facility they’d built at St. Augustine.
If the opportunity arose, would he do that now?
He didn’t give her the chance to ask. “I’ll tell the Doctor you’re in,” he said. “Excuse me a moment, please.”
“The Doctor?” Ann asked as he stepped through the doors and into darkness. Ian said nothing.
“What is this place?” said Ann finally.
“It’s the Octagon: which is to say, an octagon. We pitched it as an homage, to the old octagon houses that used to be safe houses for the Underground Railroad here in Upper Canada.”
“Back in the day. When slavery was more, um, institutionalized? Nice juxtaposition.”
Rickhardt barked a laugh. “Good one,” he said. “Of course, the octagon has other symbolism too. Older symbolism.”
Ann wouldn’t bite. “And it’s a ballroom?” she said instead.
“It’s not. ‘Ballroom’ is what’s written on the plans we filed with the township.”
“So no weddings here,” said Ann.
“No,” he said. “Maybe next time.”
<
br /> Ian sat down on one of the couches. Ann made a point of sitting on the other. “Must have cost you a fortune,” she said, and Ian nodded.
“As you can tell by now,” he said, “I’m not what you’d call stingy. And,” he added, as the door beyond them swung open, into the darkness, “I’m not alone.”
Ann blinked, as the man who was surely the Doctor stepped from it, into the light.
“Look at you,” said Charlie Sunderland.
He had lost some hair, and gained a little weight, but not so much of either, given that Ann had last seen him more than fifteen
years ago.
He wore a pair of dark slacks, a white shirt and unlike Rickhardt and Peter, dark leather shoes. He stepped forward, gingerly shut the door behind him. He looked as though he’d gotten some sun.
“You’re all grown,” he continued, as he moved to sit on Ann’s couch. Ian withdrew perceptibly. It was as though Dracula had stepped into the room. Or more aptly, Josef Mengele.
If Ann looked at him in just the right way, she thought she might scream.
She had guessed about Sunderland being here, being involved; Ian had as much as confirmed it.
But the fact of him, here—it was a blunt, visceral thing; the dangling string off the end of a long continuum that had begun in a little room years ago, and continued in another little room in the woods, and finished here. She crossed her legs and folded her hands on her knee, and knitted her fingers together tightly.
Sunderland smiled gently.
“I can imagine,” he said, “that you’re angry with me.”
Ann shut her eyes. She imagined that she was angry, too. She didn’t say anything though.
“Well, you might have cause to be,” he said. “If nothing else, I didn’t do a very good job then, in fulfilling my promise to your parents.”
“That’s true,” said Ann, opening her eyes again. “You didn’t do any kind of job.