The Haunting Lessons: 1, 2, 3, 4, I Declare a Demon War (The Ghosts & Demons Series)

by Robert Chazz Chute

  We both heard the pounding of running feet and the pleasant chime at the front entrance. The door slammed behind him. Sam turned the lock on her office door. Her knees were still shaking as she sat in a chair. She looked so pale, I thought she might faint, too.

  “‘G is for gun?’ Really?” I managed a smile before I started crying.

  Sam pulled the magazine from the pistol grip, shook it and shrugged. The weapon was not loaded. “Good thing he didn’t know bullets are filed under B.” Sam cried, too.

  Then, through our tears, we began to laugh together. That’s how I made my second friend in New York.

  Lesson 43: You never really know what’s going on until after it happens.

  19

  After a quick trip to the bathroom, a gargle and a splash of water in my face, I was in the passenger seat of a hearse.

  Sam drove but couldn’t seem to stop herself from lecturing. “For future reference, you made a rookie mistake. When someone is at the casket paying their respects, they are in the bubble of quiet reflection. Don’t offer them comfort, coffee or tea until they move at least ten feet from the casket and their backs are turned to the body.”

  “Does this mean I still have a job?”

  “Technically, Tammy, I think you have two jobs. I’m taking you to the second one now. Do you know the address where the bodies of those girls are?”

  “No. It’s like a dream. The technical details are already receding.”

  “Understandable. I’m good at math,” she said, “but have you ever tried to do math in your dreams?”

  “No,” I said. “That’s weird.”

  “Well, I’ve tried it and it’s impossible.”

  “I can picture the house. If I saw it again, I’d know it.”

  “Good. You may be called upon to do so.”

  She turned a corner and wove through thick traffic easily. “This is what I love about driving the coach,” she said. “People give way and give the meat wagon respect. Even in this city.”

  I glanced behind me into the rear of the hearse. “We’re riding empty.”

  “Yeah, but they don’t know there’s no body in back. People are superstitious.”

  “From what I’ve seen,” I said, “they ought to be. How long have you been seeing ghosts?”

  Sam spared me a glance. “Oh, I don’t. I leave that to…people like you. Victor’s people. I leave that stuff to you gladly.”

  “Yeah. I haven’t gotten to the point where it’s a fun party trick yet.”

  “Victor says a war is coming. When the secret is out, he says, ‘There will be Hell to pay.’ I think he means that expression literally.”

  I didn’t know what to make of that so I put the warning aside. “It just occurred to me that this is the second time this year a man has tried to kill me. They were both doctors. How am I ever going to get a checkup again?”

  “Yeah, I’d be too paranoid to get in the stirrups if I were you.”

  “Sam!”

  “Sorry. Joke.”

  “Well, yeah, but how will I?”

  “I’ll give you the name of my gyno. She delivered my kids and I haven’t seen her sacrifice a goat in her waiting room yet. How did the first one try to kill you?”

  “Strangulation. To be fair, I was threatening to rip open his throat with a pen at the time. Long story. That sounds worse than it was. I mean, it sounds awful but, believe it or not, I was the good guy in that situation.”

  The tires squealed and the engine growled as Sam wheeled around a tight corner. “All of Victor’s people are good as far as I can tell. I’ll take your word for it.”

  “You keep saying Victor’s people. What do you mean by that? I thought you were one of Victor’s people.”

  “I’m the chocolate icing on the cake that hides the fact that it’s really a mud pie. I’m part of the funding side of things, but I don’t work the underside of the city. If I were expecting the dark side to show up at Castille, I’d have kept my gun loaded. I always thought this stuff was for Victor’s people to deal with. I’m a regular citizen,” Sam said. “My job is to keep pretending everything’s okay.”

  “Everything’s not okay?”

  “Do you read the news?”

  “Nope.”

  She sighed. “Youth.”

  “Sam, are we going to try to find Carl Brooks in Queens?”

  She stepped on the brakes. Tall warehouses surrounded us and I guessed we were in the Meatpacking District. These dark hulks didn’t seem to house lofts or businesses. They were just anonymous, boarded up buildings that looked like they might be condemned at any moment.

  Sam picked up her phone and dialed a number. A steel gate across the street slid back to reveal a narrow alley. As soon as the opening was wide enough, Sam shot the car through the gap.

  “I’m still a civilian and aim to stay that way,” Sam said. “But you’ll need backup. My understanding is there’s usually a training and orientation period. Sounds to me like you’re already swimming at the deep end of the pool.”

  Sam turned left at the end of the alley and the lane widened. Ahead, at the bottom of one of the warehouses, I saw a line of light growing as we approached. The entrance to a parking garage yawned open.

  “Sam? Why do you keep the secret? That ghosts are real, I mean?” I was distraught. I thought the trouble was just ghosts. I’d forgotten Lesson 13. Remember Lesson 13? Civilization lives and breathes as it is because of the power of denial. As strong as denial is, I didn’t understand then how brittle denial can be. Trees stand a long time because they bend to the wind. Just like old trees, rigidity leads to the fall of civilizations.

  Sam parked the hearse and turned off the engine. “Why do I keep the secret? Because it’s crazy. Because ghosts aren’t the half of it. Because, ha! You think people argue about religion now? There’d be religious wars. A lot of religion is relatively harmless now, and even does a lot of good, partly because people don’t take it too seriously. If people start to understand the forces that are here, among us, trying to burst through? Wow. We’d have a lot more fundamentalists running around spouting the one true way and killing anyone who disagrees.”

  “You’re that sure people can’t handle the truth?” As soon as I said it, I thought Sam might break out her Jack Nicholson impression for the obligatory A Few Good Men reference.

  She didn’t take the bait. Sam looked me in the eye, deadly serious. “I’m sure. Most of them can’t handle a snowstorm. Wait till you see what happens if the word really gets out and boneheads start to worry about the nature of existence. These deep questions are what sports, politics, the stock market, television, Twitter, Facebook and arguing about movies over lattes is for, kid! The nonsense is here to distract us from thinking about what’s waiting at the end of our short little earthly ride.

  “The system works because we hardly think about what’s next. We bury our concerns, six feet down, and pretend. I never want to stop pretending. No one does.”

  20

  Sam gave the hearse’s horn two, long blasts and the sound bounced around the unlit parking garage. It felt like we were alone in a cave.

  “You know, lots of people already suspect the truth. I’m not alone in keeping the secret.” Sam said. “Victor says the Underworld is rising up and spilling into our world. That’s one reason why there are more suicide bombers in the world lately.”

  “What’s the other reason?”

  “There are many. Mainly poverty. Poverty is a weapon of mass destruction.”

  “Um. Okay.”

  “My point is, we’re building toward something. What Victor calls the Evil Quotient is rising again.”

  “The Evil Quotient?”

  “Of course. It rises and falls, but it’s a thing, like how there were very few serial killers in the United States and over a few decades their numbers built up until we were hip deep in them.”

  “Um…what do you mean by that quotient rising again?”

  “According to
Victor’s people, it’s cyclical. They say everything is.”

  “So when was the Evil Quotient high before?”

  “They argue about that. Star positions and high math are involved. Maybe it was the Dark Ages or maybe the George Bush administration.”

  “That’s a lot of latitude.”

  “Yeah. Not an exact science. Witches argue like bitches, apparently. They argue about carrying the two or something. Anyway, Victor says more people have seen ghosts or had an intuition of them as things get worse, measurably. The theory is that it’s because the Underworld and the Overworld are getting closer to each other. Like they say in Ghostbusters, ‘Don’t cross the streams!’”

  “I really should see that movie.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  I shook my head.

  “And here I thought you were something special. Maybe you aren’t ready for Adult Swim, after all.” She let out a girlish giggle. Or maybe she was on the edge of hysteria, I couldn’t say for sure.

  “If you’re on the outside, how do you know all this?”

  She sighed. “Victor and I used to be lovers. No secrets in bed. And he needs people like me to help keep his empire funded. I don’t know for sure, but maybe a quarter of the managers of his businesses know the truth.”

  “What is the truth?”

  “The truth is that reality is even scarier than we thought. We can’t handle that.”

  “Maybe we could if given the chance.”

  Sam looked at me for a moment. I thought she was considering my idea. I was wrong. She was formulating an argument why no one must ever know about ghosts.

  “Did you know that nearly eight in ten Americans believe in angels?” Sam asked. “That’s a real statistic.”

  My eyes widened. “Are you saying angels are real?”

  Sam snorted. “Oh, Iowa. Let the scales fall from your eyes. People believe in angels because they want to think there is hope. They’re desperate for hope and lottery wins. When people get glimpses of the Underworld, they think they see an angel because people need comfort. They want their world to make sense in a benevolent way. That’s why climate change deniers get so much traction. They’re soothing to the nerves.”

  “Oh, I don’t know — ”

  Sam shook her head harder. “People don’t want to see a scary world unless it’s Sunday night when The Walking Dead comes on. When ordinary people see ghosts, that’s the gap between Under and Over closing. They glimpse a scary thing and they want to think that apparition is an angel. There’s no comfort in knowing it’s your crazy Aunt Sadie who died in a fertilizer factory explosion and is now doomed to walk the Earth for some reason no one understands. People love certainty. They prefer it to truth nine times out of ten. If the ethereal meets the concrete and the secret really gets out, the looting and the self-righteous condemnation might not ever stop.”

  “What do you think would happen?”

  “We talk a good game about Good and Evil. If everyone knew and acknowledged in their hearts that our dead relatives are still here and watching us? The freak out would go on and on. Society is fragile, Tamara. All the churches and sects and cults would go to war over which one true religion will keep us from becoming ghosts. Well…nobody can get a burger and a decent cup of coffee in the ideologue apocalypse.”

  Lesson 44: Our way of life, and coffee, are threatened. The stakes are very high.

  I worked it through in my head. I thought of Brad’s father piling more mashed potatoes on his plate last Christmas and worrying aloud that India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons. I pictured Mama leading a platoon of Presbyterians in a firefight with the local Seventh Day Adventists. “Jesus!” I said finally.

  “I’m unclear on how He may be involved,” she deadpanned.

  “Did you practice that speech?” I asked.

  “No. I just talked about it many times with Victor. He wanted to recruit me to the cause. He and his mystics tried to train me in the ‘Art of Seeing the Unseen.’ Turns out I don’t have the knack. And given what I do for a living, I’m grateful. I don’t want that superpower, thanks. You do you, Boo.” Sam took a deep breath but it was still shaky as she let it out. “Any questions?”

  “You and Victor, huh?”

  Sam laughed. She laughed a lot. It was that edgy, nervous laugh I’d heard from some residents at Shibboleth that conveyed: I’m not crazy. I’m just on the edge of crazy and everything’s fine, everything’s fine, everything’s okay…crazy? Who? Me? She laughed the way people laugh on roller coasters, shaking and nervous and maybe on the edge of losing bladder control.

  “Don’t wrinkle your nose over me and Victor,” Sam said. “He’s an elegant man and I love the way he speaks. When we had sex, he only spoke Spanish. It was wow.”

  “Wow.”

  “And pow. It was a long time ago, before I had kids…and only slightly after I met the man who became my husband.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah. Oh.”

  “What happens now?”

  “I don’t know and I won’t know. I’m dropping you off. Regular citizen, remember? I’m a civilian. Keep your military secrets to yourself.”

  “But — ”

  “Tamara. Look at me. When I was a kid a little younger than you, I was going to be a marine biologist. I like whales. Then my father died and I went to his funeral and he didn’t look like himself. He looked like a wax doll. The cosmetologist did a terrible job. My father didn’t look like my father. He looked like a poor imitation of my father under a yellow light.

  “That picture of my dad — that last picture — is the only thing that haunts me. So while my best friends from high school went off to become lawyers and dentists and chiropractors, I ended up studying Mortuary Science. My last memory of my dad before we buried him is all the haunting I want in my life.”

  I nodded. “But, if you’re a civilian, what does that make me?”

  Sam and I both jumped, nerves jangling, as my door opened. I looked up into a face I recognized. It was Victor’s driver, the huge man with the cauliflower ears and the bent nose. He stood holding the door open with one hand. His other hand held a collapsed black and red umbrella. “You’re late,” he said.

  “I didn’t even know I had an appointment,” I said.

  He smiled, revealing that two upper front teeth were gold plated. His eyes were a gray that made me think of wolves. His sort of face was a guarantee that, under that expensive suit he was packed into, his body was a road map of muscles and veins and aggressive tattoos.

  “Mr. Fuentes has finished his conference with the coven. He is waiting for you in the library, Ms. Smythe. Welcome to the Choir Invisible.”

  Lesson 45: People will say some ridiculous stuff to you. Keep a straight face in case the impossible turns out to be real. If you don’t react to news, people will think you’re smarter and cooler than you really are. That’s okay as long as you don’t fool yourself, too.

  21

  Sam gave me one quick wave. “If you survive the night, I’ll have more work for you. Call me.” She revved the hearse’s engine and pulled out of the parking garage in a hurry.

  “Wow. That was kind of cold,” I said.

  The big man spoke with a clipped accent that I guessed might be Russian. “Samantha is afraid. She knows the truth but prefers the lie. She stands with many.”

  “I got that.”

  “Her first child is Victor’s son, but Samantha and her husband Bryce prefer to pretend that Victor is not the father.”

  “Dude! Do you say everything that comes to mind?”

  “Jesus said the truth shall set us free.”

  “They crucified him.”

  “You have a point. Samantha does not like me. I think she is pretty. She does not think I am pretty.”

  “There’s something really dysfunctional about you. I’m not sure what it is yet. Are you a robot?”

  He looked down at himself and appeared to consider the question seriously. “To my k
nowledge, no. However, if I were a robot who was programmed without self-knowledge, and if, perhaps, I was a cyborg with organic components that could bleed and feel pain…it is possible I am a robot. I don’t think it likely, but it is possible we are all robots.” He pronounced the word possible as if he was saying pissable.

  “You’re starting to freak me out. Who are you?”

  “Apologies. I am Vladimir Estasia. Please call me Vlad.”

  When he said please, he pronounced it pliss. My hand disappeared into his calloused palm as we shook hands and I felt an electrical shock pass between us. The feeling lingered longer than a quick spark of static electricity and I felt an uncomfortable tingling race up my arm.

  Vlad held on a little too long and only let go when I ripped my hand from his grasp.

  “You have suffered a terrible loss,” he said. “I am sorry.” A single tear tracked down his cheek. “Terrible.”

  “Yes…uh, thanks. How did you know that?”

  Vlad shrugged and wiped the tear away with scarred knuckles. “It is written on your nerves. I am sorry. I should have asked first before slipping into a reading. It is not often that I encounter such a deep love. You loved your young man so very much.”

  “I did.”

  “It is a tragic love.”

  “It was good while it lasted.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Vlad said. “I mean you loved and continue to love him but all he has now is rage and resentment. He will not be free until you set him free.”

  “What?”

  Vlad bent his head and closed his eyes. “Not what. Who. You.”

  “What?”

  “No. Who. Or whom. Pardon my English. You must ask your young man’s forgiveness. His circumstance in the place between worlds is partially your fault.”

  I looked him up and down and spoke through clenched teeth. “You should take your act over to Coney Island, man. There’s another lousy medium on the Boardwalk you could trade fortunes with and skin the rubes.”

  He shrugged. “I am rarely wrong. Your nerves — ”

  “You’ve got your wires crossed this time. And I’m starting to think I should kick your ass.”