Twelfth Night (A Wendover House Mystery Book 2)
Page 4
“Brandy?” I asked softly.
Finally she blinked.
“I swear this really happened. I swear. It was real. And it was evil.”
And I believed her. There was gooseflesh on my arms even before she started her tale. Brandy didn’t talk much about her Hollywood days—really only once while drunk and lamenting her first divorce—but I knew her time out west had been about as happy as the most tragic Russian novel.
She had never spoken about ghosts though. Given how bad everything else had been, I knew that this must have been something beyond awful.
“You don’t have to go into.…” I began and stopped, realizing from the surprised looks that I was being clumsy and about to speak of things that others didn’t need to know about my friend. Especially not judgmental Mary who liked to gossip. I felt cloddish, unsure how to go on with the party and the stories and yet how to stop my friend from confiding something she might regret.
Of course, would anyone else be less inept in the situation? If this were a case of offering physical first aid I could cope better. Barbara’s—Brandy’s—scars were emotional and the choice to show them was hers.
I glanced at the faces around the table. They were staring, losing their definition as the candles burned low, but not enough that I couldn’t see they were interested. Brandy’s face was stark, a perfect artist’s exercise of fear. Or maybe it was just that my psyche was tender and overreacting to her words. In any event, I realized that I had just drawn an inside straight. This was what was needed to really involve the others. Ben’s and Harris’s stories had been good, but they were something that might have been pulled from a generic ghost book and their telling had rather robbed them of the feeling of true horror they must have felt. Or perhaps it was just me, because I had some kind of shared experience with Hannah. No one else seemed as horrified by what had happened during their encounters with spirits as I was when I saw mine. They didn’t take it personally. Maybe because they were able to leave their ghosts, which were haunting a place and not a person. They had described preservations, fragments of a personality endlessly repeating the same act, but not connected personally to the living who witnessed their deeds.
I wanted genuine, firsthand accounts of awful things that were both sentient and after specific victims. That kind of testimony would strip away the last of the disbelief anyone had, and assure me that I wasn’t alone in this experience.
Still, I knew this story wouldn’t be comfortable and I hoped Brandy wasn’t about to start oversharing because of the mulled wine. I wanted support, corroboration of the supernatural, but not at the expense of my friend’s dignity.
She began speaking, her words a tumble.
“It was when I went out to Hollywood to be an actress. Tess knows—a little. I’d been there a couple months and I was…. It was hard to get callbacks and…. Well, but then I got invited to this producer’s house for a party. The mansion was pretty old, pretty creepy really. Lillian Bowes, the silent film star, committed suicide there—and a maid drowned in the pool. There was also a rumor that the Black Lotus Strangler had been a guest there and, well, you know…. But it was my big chance so.…”
Note: I’m going to take over the storytelling here. Brandy has never been good at linear narrative and there are few things that she would never explain about her desperate early days in Hollywood—and probably doesn’t even admit to herself. Also, the broken ums and wells don’t paint a picture of the mood her story caused. So I’ll tell it for her. I’ve also changed some names because I don’t want lawsuits from the survivors’ families.
Let me start by saying that I realize that most people are the same everywhere. We all require food, shelter, and clothing. We are defensive and offensive, and fall victim to the same diseases. But the people who are drawn to Hollywood—to stardom—have other needs too, among them being a requirement for outside approval, external validation, even adoration. And like thirsty people after water, they take insane risks, and even sell themselves to get it.
Brandy was no exception. There was a frightening restlessness in her back then, a dark drive for fame. She wasn’t interested in becoming a good actress, in perfecting the craft, in going on the stage. She wanted the ink, the video, the big screen. She wanted to be a star.
But stardom doesn’t happen overnight, and not without hard work and some lucky breaks—which she couldn’t seem to get. So she had to find other ways to live, other ways to get money that didn’t interfere with random casting calls and showing herself in the “right” places. She chose a career that many other girls have done before, but she can’t live with the ugly words for what she did back then to get noticed, not now that her moral vision has returned to twenty-twenty. Escort is the politest term for her means of making money when the first of the month came and there was no rent money. And even with this sideline, her plans for being a star were coming undone. Everything was expensive and she needed clothes and a professional portfolio, as well as pesky necessities like food and a place to stay.
Then Fate intervened. She bumped into a man at a casting call—an unpleasant, touchy-feely kind of man who had a pocket full of cocaine and a good line of chat—and he invited her to a party at a client’s house….
That kind of Hollywood gathering was a first for her and represented the pinnacle of opportunity for an unknown actress/escort. The promise of illustrious company dazzled her into incautious stupidity. She was a naïve twenty-two, college educated but her mind was still stuffed with small town values and beliefs about how the world worked. When someone said that they could make her a star, she believed it, even though the person promising her hadn’t even a passing acquaintance with the truth. And, in her defense, it would have been hard not to believe when she wanted stardom so badly and she was staring at the defeat of her dreams. When you are young, the public death of a fantasy is humiliating beyond all words. Going home to the family’s I-told-you-sos was unbearable, unthinkable. So she chose to be blind to the danger she was courting and even smiled as the sweaty hands of the procurer caressed her.
Hale House was huge, elegant, and imposing, but kind of like the third circle of Hell because of the lighting and the people in it. You can look it up online, though now it is used as a headquarters for a nonprofit and all the gaudy trappings have been stripped away. Even if the furnishings could have been cleaned, who wanted to sit on a sofa once covered in blood and semen?
Brandy climbed out of the taxi and used the last of her money to pay the driver. A hot wind was blowing that night and it felt like what the natives refer to as earthquake weather. She had a moment of unease and hesitated at the edge of the property, watching, thinking. She was nervous but she also felt like a kid outside a toy shop full of things she wanted. Needed.
She went up to the security guard and gave her name. He looked her up and down, and without consulting his list, let her inside.
Everyone within the gates was gorgeous—the women lustrous and pampered, the men often not only handsome but glossy with a patina of power. And jaded as they were from their years of wallowing in the fleshpots and shoving things up their noses, Brandy must have seemed like a shiny new penny, an innocent among the heathens. Hungry eyes watched her. At first she was flattered but then began to feel self-conscious. People looked her over but they didn’t speak to her.
Her naïveté drew someone else that night who was stranger than the others present and, though it is hard to believe because the experience frightened her so badly, perhaps it saved her from something worse since her host was later arrested and charged with multiple counts of rape and battery, and later for a murder that happened that night. It turned out that he had bought the house because the Black Lotus Strangler had lived there and he was living out some dark fantasies of his own.
The room where she found herself herded by the guards and caterers was large, full of modular furniture covered in red and black vinyl. Lights strobed and there was a disco ball. Brandy thought it was like bein
g inside a jukebox. It was bright, loud, and the cocaine—which she had never tried before—and the Quaaludes were making her head throb and her heart beat way too fast while also making her sluggish and sleepy. The room also had a strange acoustic that brought on what her daddy called a dry drunk, a state where you didn’t really need drugs for everyone got kind of fuzzy and high. There were drugs though. Lots and lots of them. Pretty pills in china bowls and salt cellars filled with cocaine, laid out like pillow mints on the glass-topped tables.
There was a boy in fishnet stockings and platform shoes dancing on a table in front of a giant plate glass window that looked out on the manmade glitter of Los Angeles that grew brighter as the hellfire sun finally set. Most of the people there were really classy, but there were a few that looked like the feature spread in a cheap porn mag. They were being stared at—like exhibits in a zoo. Or, more accurately, like lobsters headed for the pot.
Brandy wondered what she looked like in her borrowed dress. Did she look sexy—like a starlet? Or was she just cheap entertainment—like that boy? Would she end up dancing on a table? She knew from the looks she got that she was inspiring immoral thought in others, which was weird given that she was not really immoral. A part of her was ashamed that this was so, but another part of her knew that she could use this. Had to use this. Even if her role for the night was poorly written and didn’t have many lines, it was still a break. There was money here—green so dense it was like a jungle. That meant opportunities for a smart girl.
Brandy sat on the edge of a chair, a giant hand made of black resin. She crossed her legs and tried to look alluring, hoping someone would come talk to her because she wasn’t good at chatting up strangers. A waiter in a bow tie and gold thong brought her some champagne. She sipped at it, feeling thirsty but not wanting to get drunk.
Time passed and she began to feel sleepy—almost drugged. Her eyes were starting to close when she felt something shift in the atmosphere. Someone new had entered the room and his presence sent a shiver down his spine.
She squinted into the flashing lights and was only able to focus enough to see the outlines of a man in black. He wore an old-fashioned cutaway coat—like the conductor at the symphony. And he felt cold—frigid as the worst day in February, which should have been nice in the heat but somehow wasn’t.
Behold, as goblins dark of mien, and portly tyrants dyed with crime…
Perhaps sensing her scrutiny, he looked away from the crowds and down at her—and then into her. His dark gaze locked onto her face like some laser sight, and then the barb went right through the skin and down to the bone. And when he didn’t find what he was looking for in her marrow and heart and stomach, he started looking through her thoughts—her soul—fine-combing her nerve endings as she went.
The sleepiness disappeared, but she remained unable to move except to shiver with something that was part pleasure but mostly alarm. This man was sinister, dangerous, and it was belatedly occurring to her that no one knew where she was—not even her “friends.” That she could disappear that night and no one would come looking for her for a very long time.
“You don’t look like you want to die—and yet you are here.”
She didn’t see his lips move, but she heard his voice even above the music and laughter.
A waiter walked by and offered her a tray with some kind of fruit. He didn’t look at the dark man, didn’t even seem to see he was there. Nor did he comment on the rancid meat smell that was beginning to taint the air.
Brandy shook her head, trying to clear it, and the waiter turned away.
“I—I don’t want to die. Help me,” she managed to gasp as the waiter moved toward another group. He seemed not to hear her and her head lolled back, suddenly too heavy to hold up.
“But you will die. Look about you. Look!”
And Brandy did. For a moment the world went out of focus as two images were overlaid and fought for ascendancy. But then they married, sharpened, and she saw how evil the place was—what an abomination she had walked into, no matter how clean it seemed on the surface. Her host was wearing some kind of pig snout. It had tusks. He was talking to a hyena in a red dress. She had blood on her lips. And there were sharks in satin shirts with heavy gold chains. Sniffing.
Because there was blood everywhere. And the room was full of people. Dead people in funny clothes like the kind from old silent movies—and they were staring at her, pity in their dead eyes.
“The drug is in your body. It may be too late,” the dark man said. “You may be joining us here.”
“No.” Brandy struggled to her feet. The room spun lazily and she felt sick to her stomach. “They wouldn’t dare. I’m—I’m not nobody. My mother loves me.”
“No one will stop Robbins, least of all himself. He does not have second thoughts. The insane never do. I never did.” He laughed.
She had to get out. Somehow. Maybe she was just having a bad trip—a reaction to those pills she had taken. After all, how did she know if they were just downers, or something else? Why had she taken them?
But maybe this was all real on some level. Maybe her brain was showing her scary things because it knew that those men were some kind of sharks, and if they tasted her blood they would keep after her forever.
Brandy began to weave toward the nearest door, avoiding bodies—dead and alive, not sure which she feared more.
“Where are you going?” a pig man asked her. He touched her hip and it hurt. He had cloven hoofs instead of hands.
Outwardly she was calm but inside she began to shudder. It took all her training, all her will to stifle her urge to scream and keep the shudders hidden inside.
“Bathroom,” she gasped, forcing a smile at the bristled face. It wasn’t a mask. No mask was that good.
“Don’t be gone long,” it snorted, its voice getting thicker. Less human.
“I won’t.”
She managed to escape the large room with its flashing lights but found herself inside some kind of conservatory, a Victorian structure made up of iron gingerbread painted flat black and filled with giant panes of frosted glass whose surface suggested refined sugar, but cut like a million tiny razorblades when she rubbed up against it. There was blood all over the glass, the orchids, and the crushed oyster shells of the path. Old blood. Shadowy blood. Ghost blood. Now her blood too.
She whimpered and rushed on as fast as her rubbery legs would carry her.
There was a door. It opened onto a pool—bright with light and shimmering tile. Except there was a body in it. A naked woman. Her mouth and eyes were open.
Brandy walked around the edges of the enclosure, telling herself that she couldn’t really be walking on bones, that it was just sticks and twigs, and the wind she felt was a Santa Ana—not a breath of hell.
She found her way to the sculpture gardens. They were oddly dark and dank under the red moon—rotten—festooned with ancient cobwebs that reminded her of every monster movie she had seen at the drive-in. There were weird, mummy-like shapes projecting out of the high walls and perched on pedestals, all covered in thick blankets of lichen and web and dead vines. Cracks in the walls leaked thick water—or maybe blood—and there was one large dent in the north sidewall that looked like it had been formed by a car. Hadn’t there been a story about someone committing suicide by ramming a car into the wall?
She prayed she didn’t fall into any pits—mantraps—but she figured they were there. All haunted castles and mansions had them. She watched her feet, staying away from the wriggling fungus cocoons that tried to trip her. She told herself that the battered stones in the wall were not giving way. That there was nothing bricked up in the niches. No one was moaning inside the concrete. The ground only seemed to have woken up and started whispering—sometimes sounding mournful, sometimes angry.
Panic gave her enough strength to climb the rusted side gate when she found it, hidden by thorny creepers. It was chained shut but she wasn’t about to ask anyone for help opening it.
When she woke up again, she was in the hospital. She had a cracked pelvis, seven stitches in her left leg, and a pumped stomach.
There were police guarding her door. There was also a lot of press waiting in the lobby. Word had gotten out that a young starlet had been injured fleeing from Hale House and the party that went so wrong. Bad drugs, dozens overdosed, three dead. All witnesses fled. Everyone wanted to talk to her about the guest list. And the bodies.
It had finally happened. She was famous.
Later Brandy married—and then divorced—the man who ran her down that night. But not until he had launched her modeling career by featuring her in his lingerie catalogue.
Watching the news that week as she recovered in a friend’s apartment, she found out who the sinister dark man was. Charles Hale had been a producer in old Hollywood. He was also suspected of being a multiple murderer, though no bodies were ever found and no charges were leveled. The picture they showed was old—after all, he had died in 1929—but she recognized him anyway.
“It was partly the drugs. Maybe all the drugs that made me imagine the animals. It had to be.” Her voice was hoarse, pleading. “That’s what the doctors said. But … but I think the drugs brought me near death and let me in on something no one else could see. Maybe I should have told the police more but I … I just didn’t tell anyone because no one would believe me. You probably don’t believe me.” She sounded mournful.
Like Brandy, I wasn’t so sure that it was all drugs, and that left me feeling cold. I had assumed that I had seen the worst my ghost could do. What if I was wrong?