The 'Geisters

by David Nickle

  “They died, because you weren’t trying to help me at all. You were trying to turn me into what—a courtesan?”

  His smile faded a little, and he looked at her. “Oh dear,” he said. “I may have left you with the impression just now that I am here to apologize to you.” Dr. Sunderland ran a forefinger along the back of the couch; if they were sitting any nearer one another, it might have seemed as though he were trying to seduce her.

  “You’ve been drinking,” he continued, “a lot. And you’re exhausted. You haven’t really slept in nearly twenty-four hours—possibly longer. Most of that time, you’ve been driving, and for most of that drive, you’ve been terrified. You have no capacity left, do you? You don’t even know why you’re here right now.”

  Dr. Sunderland spoke in slow, measured tones that had a lulling effect. Ann drew a deep breath, and blinked.

  “So why,” he said, “don’t you simply repeat the words again: ‘Belaim, foredawned, sheepmorne . . .’”

  “Fuck off,” said Ann, and at that, Dr. Sunderland was quiet. He blinked, as though he’d been slapped. Ian, on the other couch, started to get up, but Sunderland motioned for him to sit.

  “We are very close to a thing right now, Ann,” said Sunderland. “A very big thing. And you’re angry, very understandably angry. Would I be too far off the mark if I said that you thought you might be able to disrupt this thing of ours? Perhaps hurt myself, and Mr. Rickhardt here, and the rest of us?”

  Ann didn’t answer.

  He sighed. “We do need you here right now. If you want to use your time here, attempting to call down the heavens on all of us . . .

  well, that’s up to you. I’d understand.”

  “You don’t think I can.”

  “You know you can’t,” said Sunderland. “If you could, you would have by now.”

  “Ask Mr. Hirsch what I can do,” she said.

  Sunderland ignored the comment. “We are on the edge of something very big, Ann. I think on some level you know that. I think that is why you came back here.”

  “I came back here,” she said, “to get my brother.”

  Sunderland nodded. “And you’re still here, even though you’ve been told that he’s gone ‘home.’ Why do you suppose that is?”

  “Because . . .” Ann took a breath, stifled a yawn “. . . because I don’t believe that.”

  And he smiled, broadly. “That’s an excellent instinct you have,” he said.

  Ann sat up. “Is he here?” she asked, and Sunderland motioned with one long arm to the doors, now shut.

  “Through there,” he said.

  iii

  Rickhardt tried to hold Ann’s hand as Sunderland held the door open for them. Ann pulled away. Sunderland was right in some of his observations; she was exhausted, and the wine from the other wing of this place had left a sour taste in her mouth. The world had a shimmer to it that she recognized, from the morning after all-night study sessions. But he was wrong: that she came here, on any level giving a shit about the thing that Sunderland and his ’geisters were on the verge of discovering, or extracting, or whatever it was he had planned; and oh, he was wrong about the fact that she had no power.

  She was sure he was wrong about that.

  He had to be.

  Darkness enveloped her as the doors shut behind them, and Ann fought an instant of panic. Should she have taken Ian Rickhardt’s hand? The air was suddenly icy cold, as though she’d stepped into a big refrigerated room. The only sound was her own heartbeat, which accelerated in a rush of adrenaline. Screaming might have helped; but as it had moments before, her breath caught still in her throat. She couldn’t so much as whisper.

  She could walk, though, and she did so, stumbling forward, hands held in front of her. It seemed as though she were running down a ramp of some sort.

  The darkness split in front of her in a vertical line of dim light. As it spread further, Ann could see that what was opening was a curtain being drawn—they had stepped into a small circle defined by a thick curtain. It rattled aside on its bar on top, and as it did, Ann found her breath. She stepped forward, and as she did, she was struck by the truth of it:

  This wasn’t a ballroom at all. It was a tower.

  It was a pit.

  They were standing on a wide balcony, that circled an octagonal atrium measuring perhaps thirty feet across. A single pillar, with a spiral staircase, ran up the middle; a narrow walkway extended to the staircase from a spot opposite where they stood.

  There were more walkways: the balcony was one of at least three; there was one maybe ten feet over Ann’s head, and another as far below. The floor, as she peered over, was a dozen feet below that. It may have gone down further; Ann’s angle of view didn’t afford her much opportunity to see, and the only light came from an octagonal skylight directly above, and this morning it didn’t offer up much.

  But she could tell that in each of the eight walls of this place, there was a curtain, like the one she’d just passed through—one on each level, one on each wall. Each of those curtains, Ann guessed, would lead to another door: and that door would lead to . . . what? A space that would be a slice of the octagon pie. At least as big as the little lounge they’d found themselves in. She found herself mapping it in her head—grasping for some measure of orientation.

  Ann approached the railing. Like the finish on the balcony, it was made of dark wood, and the rail was padded with what felt like real leather. She leaned on it, and tried to look down, then up. The lattice of the skylight reminded her of a spider’s web—an effect that she expected was the intent of whichever architect Rickhardt had finally hired to build this thing. It looked like some 18th-century idea of a prison, or an insane asylum, where the cells ringed the atrium, and the guards watched from the middle. A panopticon.

  “See, Ann,” said Ian Rickhardt from behind her, “just keep holding on.”

  On the other side of the chamber, one of the curtains wavered. Something moved out—Ann was sure she could see it, a small figure—but it was gone as fast as it had come.

  “Ann,” said Ian, so close that she could feel his breath on her neck. Ann shifted aside, and turned.

  Ian wasn’t there. He was standing an eighth of the way around the balcony, gazing dreamily into the centre. His left arm was hanging out from his body, at about twenty degrees, his fingers curled and spread—

  —as though he were holding someone’s hand.

  Dr. Sunderland leaned against the wall, beside the curtain they’d just come through. He had his arms folded tight, but despite the body language he didn’t seem perturbed; just cold, like Ann. He motioned her to come closer, and she came.

  “It is a poltergeist that is holding Ian’s hand,” he said quietly, nearly whispering it in Ann’s ear, “in case you hadn’t guessed.”

  Ann swallowed hard.

  “And he thinks it’s me,” she said. “Holding his hand.”

  “Oh, I think it’s dawning on him that it’s not,” said Dr. Sunderland. “Look.”

  Ian was looking at Ann, and looking down at his hand, his eyes widened in marvel and, Ann supposed, that terror he so craved. Dr. Sunderland smiled.

  “It’s one of the games they play,” he said, “before it gets more serious. The spectral hand, holding your own, in the dark. You think that it was your friend’s hand. But when the light comes on, and you say, ‘Thank God you were there holding my hand,’ your friend says: ‘I wasn’t holding your hand.’ It’s an old Shirley Jackson trick.”

  “Shirley Jackson?”

  “The Haunting of Hill House?” said Dr. Sunderland, and regarded Ann. “No? Well I can hardly blame you for staying clear of haunted house novels, given your upbringing. But it’s fair to say that Shirley Jackson’s the Marquis de Sade for the ’geisters.”

  The curtain behind Ian billowed, and for only an instant a shadow fell across Ian Rickhardt, and then his shirt bi
llowed too. He bent down, as though he could see something more than just moving shadows, shifting curtains. Sunderland shook his head bemusedly, and pushed himself away from the wall.

  “Mr. Rickhardt!” he called. “We do still have business, yes?”

  Rickhardt seemed to consider that, but Ann suspected it was for show. “You take care of it,” he said. “I’ll catch up.”

  As they watched, he fell to his hands and knees and crawled through the curtains, and was gone.

  iv

  “The heart wants,” said Charlie Sunderland wryly, “what the heart wants.”

  The air seemed to warm as he spoke—or rather, the chill began to flee. Ann felt her shoulders relaxing, and only from that realized how tightly hunched she’d been. Sunderland also flexed his fingers. He looked at Ann.

  “Now I will apologize,” said Sunderland. “We’re not all like Rickhardt. Some of us—”

  “—are like Hirsch?”

  Sunderland nodded. “Some are like him.”

  “And you aren’t like either of them.”

  “I’m not,” said Sunderland, and he flexed the fingers of both hands, as though re-introducing blood flow into them. “Would you please follow me?” he said, and headed around the balcony to the little bridge to the staircase.

  They climbed down the narrow spiral, past two other floors. On each of them, Ann saw eight more sets of curtains. She asked what was behind them.

  “Rooms,” said Sunderland, “some of them containing poltergeists. Several of them also containing men.”

  “Is Philip in one of those rooms?” she asked sharply, and was surprised when Dr. Sunderland merely nodded.

  Ann halted between floors, clutching the twisting metal bannister.

  “Is he safe?”

  “Oh no,” said Sunderland.

  “Don’t joke,” she said.

  Sunderland shrugged and said, “All right.”

  He circled the spiral once, then stopped as he realized that Ann wasn’t following.

  “You don’t remember much from our time together, do you?”

  Ann peered down at him through the empty risers. “I remember more and more,” she said. “I remember the three of us—and the knife. But you drugged us, didn’t you? Up at that lodge of yours.”

  “Only as needed. But you remember the knife. I’m not quite sure what that refers to.”

  “There was a scalpel,” said Ann. “You set it in front of Philip, as he slept, after you’d injected him, and it floated—”

  “Floated?”

  “Yes. It was ‘just the three of us,’ you’d said. After you injected Philip with something to knock him out. You said you needed to isolate me. You explained, ‘now it is just the three of us.’”

  “And you remember this?” he said. “Did Philip tell you about it?”

  Ann thought about that. It had come to her as she imagined talking to Philip, as she shut her eyes in the Rosedale Arms. Philip had reminded her. But she was there.

  “I remembered it.”

  “Fascinating,” said Sunderland softly. He climbed back up around the spiral, so he stood nearly face to face with Ann.

  “What’s so fascinating?”

  “All that did happen,” he said. “I injected Philip with scopolamine that day. There was an . . . event involving a scalpel. But I don’t see how you could have known about it, Ann.”

  “Why is that?”

  “You weren’t there.”

  Ann took a step backward. “What—”

  “It was just Philip, and myself . . . and as it turned out, the Insect.”

  “I was there,” said Ann, and before she could say more, Sunderland raised his hand.

  “I don’t doubt that you were,” he said, “on some level. In some form. But physically . . . physically, you weren’t present.”

  Ann considered that. He was drugging them. Of course he was drugging them. Jesus wept.

  “Tell me, Ann, does the Insect speak with you? Tell you things, from places you can’t possibly be?”

  Ann clutched onto the railing, with both hands.

  “Are you going to tell me where Philip is?” she asked.

  “Not just at the moment,” said Sunderland. “I’d like you to answer my question, though.”

  The railing on the staircase was iron, and although the air was warmer here it was cold as ice as Ann gripped it. Don’t let him touch you, Philip had said, that time they had first gone to Sunderland’s clinic in Etobicoke. She shut her eyes, tight enough that colour flashed across her retinas in a sheet of red.

  “What were you doing with Philip,” she said, “when I wasn’t there?”

  “Treating him,” said Sunderland sharply. “Now answer my question. Does the Insect speak with you?”

  “All the time,” said Ann, returning his tone in kind. “Now what did you do to Philip? Did you touch him?”

  “No. I did not. Had the Insect told you that I had?”

  The red fractured and lightened to an orange, and a yellow. The metal was freezing cold.

  “Where is Philip?”

  It wasn’t just the metal, now—the air chilled around her, and that chill deepened into her bones. Ann’s teeth began to

  chatter.

  Sunderland put his hand on Ann’s arm. It was hot by contrast, and although she tried to throw him off, he held tight.

  “I never touched Philip,” he said. “I was treating him.”

  “You were treating me,” said Ann. “I remember that much.”

  “Ann—Ann, open your eyes and look at me.”

  This Ann did, as green images blossomed from within the yellow in her retinas.

  “If I were only treating you,” he said, “I would have only brought you to the lodge.”

  “I was the one with the Insect,” said Ann. She could barely speak through the cold.

  “Ann,” said Sunderland, “please come down the rest of the way. I want to talk to you, and run some—”

  Sunderland didn’t finish. There was a fierce gust of air that whirled about and robbed Ann of her breath. She shut her eyes, on a bloom of violet on her lids. She half-expected when she opened them again to find Sunderland gone, plucked from the stairs and smashed to the ground—or perhaps against the skylight.

  Sunderland hadn’t moved.

  “I want,” he said levelly, “to talk to you and run some tests. Tell that to your Insect. Tell it—tell yourself, that when we do this, it’ll be time to meet up with Philip.”

  “I want to see him now.”

  “Ann. No. Not quite yet. We have to take this process step by step. You’re in a fragile state right now.”

  Ann thought to herself: I could just push you right now, over the edge of this goddamn staircase. I bet I could do that, fragile as you say I am. I bet I could.

  But she knew that she wouldn’t. In spite of all that had happened, Ann was a little dismayed and a little relieved to realize that she didn’t quite have a murder in her.

  The staircase bottomed out on a concrete floor. Ann was surprised to find that she could see—from above, it had seemed pitch black. But this far down, her eyes adjusted to the gloom and the skylight did its work. The central park was illuminated with a dull light. Like the floor of a barn. Its walls were lost in shadows between sturdy steel girders and wooden crossbeams. Ann squinted up the column of light. This whole structure, basement to roof, couldn’t have been any less than a hundred feet.

  That would be a long way to fall, Ann thought. Sunderland might have been thinking the same thing; as soon as he stepped off the staircase, he had discreetly moved himself underneath the lip of the lowest balcony, and leaned against the girder there, almost in the manner of an embrace.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s sit and talk.”

  Past the pillar, Ann could see that a small living space had been arranged: another couch
like the ones upstairs, and a little table, and two wing-backed armchairs. There was an antique-looking floor lamp between them, with three orchid-shaped shades, unlit.

  Ann waited for Sunderland to settle on the couch, and selected the farthest armchair.

  “Let’s get this done,” she said.

  Sunderland steepled his fingers in front of his face. In the dark, he might have been smiling.

  “Mr. Hirsch,” he said. “I wanted to ask you about him.”

  “I’m . . . sorry about that.”

  “Really? Why should you be sorry? You didn’t do anything. The poor man had a stroke!” Sunderland shifted so he leaned forward. “Thank God he was in a hospital when it happened.”

  “What did you want to ask me?”

  “What was he up to? What exactly?”

  “There was trouble with the FAA, of course. He was there to represent me. Didn’t you read the papers?”

  Sunderland reached up to the light and pulled a chain. Two of the three lamps glowed. They didn’t cast much light beyond the circle in which they sat—the rest of the space seemed darker in contrast. But Ann got a good look at Sunderland’s face. He’d moved his hands, and she could tell for certain: he wasn’t smiling at all.

  “What was he up to, in the hospital room?” Sunderland’s eyes were lost in the shadow of his brow. He shifted to the very front of the sofa, his hands wringing in front of him.

  “What do you think?” Ann snapped. “What was Ian up to? What are any of you up to? Do you want a detailed description?”

  Sunderland sat back a hair, opened his hands in a gesture of appeasement. “All right, no. I’ll be more direct. Was he . . . praying?”

  In spite of herself, Ann laughed. “Praying? No.” She thought about Hirsch, letting his trousers slide off him, letting himself be taken—like a noon-hour philanderer at a suburban rub-and-tug. “Not praying.” Sunderland sat quietly, eyebrows raised slightly, waiting for more. “He was making an offer.”

  “Yes,” said Sunderland. “An offer to take you away. To St. Augustine, yes?”

  “That’s where he said. Ian tells me they’re religious whack-jobs there. And that I’m better off here.”