What Lies Below

by Mark Lukens

  But she would talk to Rita later about that. Right now she needed to concentrate on what Leo wanted to tell her.

  She waited for him to continue.

  “I don’t know how to say this,” Leo finally said, his face scrunching up in concern. He looked like a human Basset Hound to Pam, his face all droopy with concern. “I don’t want to make you angry.”

  “I won’t be,” Pam promised, but she knew she couldn’t keep that promise.

  “I don’t think your mother left you.”

  Leo looked relieved now that he had spit out the words. The words were out in the open now and couldn’t be taken back. He sat back in his chair and folded his arms over his chest like a chess player waiting for his opponent’s move.

  “What do you mean?” Pam asked him.

  “I think something might have happened to her,” he said in such a low voice it was almost a whisper.

  Pam shook her head slightly, but she didn’t say anything. She tried to process what Leo had just said.

  Leo hunched forward and seemed excited now that he had opened the floodgates. “I don’t think Diane would’ve just left you without a fight. I don’t think she would’ve left all of her share of your father’s money behind. The house. The cars. I think she may have had some sort of … accident, and your father may have either covered it up … or … or maybe he may have been behind it.”

  “What?” Pam breathed out. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

  “I’ve never said anything to anyone before,” Leo continued quickly in a low voice like other diners might overhear. He stared at her and his eyebrows lowered, making his eyes look much darker. He no longer resembled a Basset Hound to Pam—now he looked like a vulture.

  “Everyone suspected that something happened to your mother,” Leo said. “But no one ever said anything aloud. Everyone in this town was always afraid of your father, afraid of his money, afraid of his influence. Hell, afraid of him personally.”

  This is going too fast, Pam thought. She needed to think about this. She needed things to slow down.

  But Leo didn’t give her a chance. Now that he had begun talking, it was like he couldn’t stop. “There have always been rumors of strange experiments your father performed over the years. People have talked about them.”

  That was enough!

  Pam stood up and plucked her wallet out of her purse with a trembling hand.

  “Pam, I didn’t mean to make you upset.”

  “You practically call my father a murderer and a mad scientist. And you don’t want me to be upset?”

  Pam’s voice was rising, and Leo glanced around at the diner. He looked back at her. “I just wanted to tell you this in person.” Leo’s Basset Hound face was back. “I always wanted to tell you this stuff before but—”

  “But you waited until my father was weak and on his deathbed. You waited until he couldn’t defend himself.”

  Leo held out his hands in a placating gesture. “I told you what I’ve always thought, what I’ve always suspected. And now I’ve made my peace.”

  Pam threw a crumpled twenty dollar bill down on the table.

  “No, please,” Leo said. “I’ve got the coffee.”

  “I don’t want your money, Leonard,” Pam growled at him. “I don’t want anything from you.”

  Pam left the diner, walking past the other patrons who were just blurs as she passed them by. She hurried across the street through the cold rain and got inside her 4-Runner. As soon as she shut the door, she realized that she was crying. Sobbing.

  God, what was happening to her?

  TWENTY-ONE

  Pam got back to the house in time for dinner. She went upstairs and changed out of her soggy clothes into fresh, dry ones. She came back down to the dining room, but she didn’t really feel like eating. She sat down at the table with Sarah and Rita.

  As they ate, Sarah explained how she had helped Rita with different parts of the dinner.

  “That’s wonderful, sweetie,” Pam said, trying her best to keep her “Happy Mom Mask” on her face. But behind her mask, her mind was still whirling; Leonard’s words still ran through her mind like a loop.

  After dinner was over and Sarah was in the family room watching an hour of TV, Pam helped Rita with the dishes.

  “Can I talk to you for a minute?” Pam asked Rita.

  Rita set some plates in an upper cabinet, and then she looked at Pam with wide eyes. She nodded.

  “Let’s step out onto the back patio,” Pam offered.

  They went outside and shut the French doors. It was almost dark out here, and the security lights were already coming on automatically around the pool and in the distant grounds.

  “You were going to say something about Maria earlier,” Pam told her, trying her best not to sound accusatory. “Right before I went into town this afternoon, you were going to say something about her, weren’t you?”

  “Miss Pam, there’s nothing …”

  “Please, Rita. You’ve known me nearly my whole life. I’m asking you for a favor.”

  “I don’t want to get anyone in trouble.”

  “She won’t be. I promise. I just want to know what you were going to say about her.” She paused for a moment and then asked: “Is it something bad?”

  “No,” Rita answered, shaking her head and smiling. “Not real bad, I guess.”

  Pam took a step towards Rita in the darkness. Even though the security lights were turning on automatically around the property, Pam and Rita hadn’t turned on the back patio light which kept them shrouded in the shadows. “Please, Rita.”

  “She … she just thinks that there might be a ghost in the house.”

  Pam just stood there for a moment. She hadn’t expected anything like that. “That’s it?” she blurted out.

  Rita nodded, but she had something else to add. “She thinks it might be the ghost of your mother.”

  “But my mother’s not dead. She left and never came back. Why would Maria think she’s seen the ghost of my mother?”

  “I don’t know, Miss Pam. But she says she’s seen this ghost and she looks exactly like the photos of your mother. And she says that Mr. Westbrook has seen the ghost of your mother, too.”

  Pam stood there for a moment in the darkness.

  And then a thought struck Pam. What if her mother really was dead? Leonard had sure seemed to think so. And maybe the whole town believed it. But she couldn’t believe her father had had anything to do with her mother’s death.

  Other scenarios raced through Pam’s mind. What if her mother had died shortly after she left them? What if she had been in an auto accident, or she had overdosed on drugs, or had gotten cancer? Maybe her father had found out, but he didn’t want to tell her, so he had kept it a secret all this time.

  But why would he have kept it a secret all these years, even after she was an adult and could handle news like that?

  “Miss Pam?” Rita said, and even in the night shadows Pam could see the concern on the woman’s face.

  “I’m sorry. My mind … it was just wandering … Thank you, Rita, for telling me about Maria.”

  “She’s not in trouble, is she?”

  “No.”

  “Please don’t tell her I said anything to you about it.”

  Pam saw a look of fear in Rita’s eyes. “Are you afraid of Maria?”

  “No,” Rita said and smiled like she was trying to prove that she wasn’t scared of her. “I just don’t want to cause trouble for anyone.”

  “You’re not causing any trouble.”

  Rita smiled and nodded like their conversation was over. “I need to finish cleaning the kitchen up.”

  “Yes, of course,” Pam said and watched Rita slip back inside the house through the French doors.

  Rita might have said she wasn’t afraid of Maria, but Pam couldn’t help feeling that she was. There was something about Maria, Pam was sure of it—something strange.

  She would write all of this down tonight i
n her journal—everything Leonard had said, and everything Rita had said. Then she would look at all of her entries, read them all together and see if she could piece all of this together.

  TWENTY-TWO

  After her conversation with Rita, Pam looked for Sarah in the family room. The TV was on and a cartoon character was just a blur of primary colors on the screen, but Sarah wasn’t in the room.

  Pam bolted out of the family room and began searching the downstairs rooms. She found Sarah in her father’s study.

  She watched Sarah from the doorway. Sarah walked past the wall of bookshelves around the room and ran her fingers over the spines of the books.

  “How could anyone read all of these books?” Sarah asked without turning around to look at Pam as she entered the study and closed the door softly.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You think Grandpa read every one of these books?”

  “I don’t think he read every one of them, but I know he read a lot of books in his life.”

  “And he wrote some of them, too,” Sarah said. She had stopped at the bookcase near the massive desk at the far end of the room which sat in front of the line of floor-to-ceiling windows covered with sheer white curtains. She rested her fingers on a shelf of books.

  “Yes,” Pam said as she walked over to her daughter.

  Her father’s study was exactly as Pam had remembered it from her childhood—the only difference was that there weren’t papers and books scattered all over the desk and tables; the place had been cleaned up and kept neat and clean.

  “I see his name on these books,” Sarah said.

  Pam stood beside Sarah and stared at the shelves devoted to her father’s writings. Many of the books were multiple copies of the same title.

  Except for the blue book—the book about the experimental psychiatric cases—the same blue book she had beside the bed in her room upstairs. There was only one copy of that book on the shelf and it stuck out among the other volumes with their dark spines.

  Leonard’s words from earlier at the diner floated back into her mind like a ghost: There have always been rumors of strange experiments your father performed over the years. People have talked.

  Pam looked at Sarah as she pushed Leonard’s voice from her mind. “Yes, Grandpa wrote all of these books on these two shelves.”

  Sarah seemed to suddenly lose interest in the books. She walked over to the massive desk that sat in front of the windows. On each side of the tall windows were rows of oak filing cabinets with antique statues situated on top of them. Other statues and ancient artifacts decorated some of the bookshelves and heavy wood tables around the room.

  Pam’s eyes roamed the walls that weren’t taken up with either windows or bookshelves. Arranged neatly on these walls were framed awards, letters, and photographs documenting her father’s illustrious career as a psychiatrist. There were framed photos of her father shaking hands with politicians and celebrities. In a corner of the room was a small entertainment area with a TV and VCR/DVD combo stacked on a metal stand. Next to that was a heavy wooden stand with a stereo and record player on top. Underneath the stereo system, tucked away in a cubbyhole, was a stack of albums—all classical music. She had a sudden childhood memory of the sound of the classical music drifting out of her father’s study when he was in here working. She fought an urge to pluck one of the albums out and play it.

  Sarah sat down in her father’s chair and it emitted a slight squeak, breaking Pam’s hypnosis.

  “I feel strange being in here,” Pam said and smiled at her daughter.

  “Why?” Sarah asked as she swiveled around in the chair a little.

  “Because I wasn’t allowed in here when I was a child.”

  “Grandpa wouldn’t let you come in here?”

  The idea seemed to be a foreign one to her daughter, almost unfathomable. But Sarah didn’t understand that her grandfather had been a different man when he was younger. More stern, more aloof, more involved with his work. He grew much softer as he got older, and when Sarah came along.

  People change, Pam thought.

  “Grandpa was always hard at work when he was in here,” Pam said, finally answering her daughter’s question.

  Pam walked around the desk, breathing in the scents of the old woods and leathers. She took Sarah’s hands. “Come on, let’s get you up to bed.”

  After Pam tucked Sarah into her bed, she went into her room and locked the door. She double checked to make sure the door was locked. She spent an hour writing in her journal, and then she lay down on the bed with the lamp on and grabbed the blue book from the end table. But then she put the book back, not wanting to look at it right now. She just wanted to let her mind relax, let it wander. Sometimes that’s when the breakthroughs came. She picked up the copy of the romance novel instead.

  She had only read a few pages before she drifted off to sleep.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Pam woke up and found herself deep in the basement. It was dark, and she knew it was still the middle of the night.

  She had been sleepwalking again.

  The only light came from the bottom of the stairs at the far end of the cavernous room and it seemed so far away from where she stood in the darkness. A sudden feeling of fear washed over her and she knew that she had to get back underneath that light. It felt like someone was going to materialize out of the shadows and grab her. Someone was going to drag her deeper into the darkness, deeper into the …

  Pam bolted for the only source of light as the panic overwhelmed her.

  She reached the bottom of the stairs and stood in the cone of light that shined down from the lone light bulb in the ceiling above her. She was breathing hard, her heart pounding in her chest. She looked back at the darkness, expecting to see someone standing in the shadows.

  But there was no one there—she was the only one down here.

  How had she gotten down the basement steps while asleep? She could’ve tripped on the basement steps and broken her neck. She saw a flash in her mind of her body crumpled up down at the bottom of the stairs, right in the same spot she was standing, and she shuddered.

  She was about to march back up the steps when she heard a shuffling noise in the darkness. And then a whisper.

  “Pam …”

  She peered into the darkness of the basement. She saw someone moving in the darkness, a figure in the gloom, a person shuffling towards her, dragging her feet across the rough concrete.

  “Pam … it’s me …”

  It was her mother.

  “I’ve come back to you …”

  Pam watched in horror as her mother materialized out of the murky shadows, her pale, thin arms rising up from her body—there was something in her hands, something she wanted to show her.

  This couldn’t be real. This couldn’t be her mother … this woman was dead.

  The frail woman was dressed in a flowing sheer white robe that was crusted with dirt and mud. A string of rotting flowers lay around her neck. And she held something in one of her hands … her father’s blue book.”

  “The answers are in here …” her mother whispered. “This is the key …” Her mother’s face was gray and dried, like a mummy’s face. Her skin crackled underneath her brittle dark hair as she talked. Her eyes looked so large in her face, which was just a skull covered in skin now. Her mouth was drawn back in a smile that looked like a grimace which exposed a set of bright white teeth that nearly glowed in the darkness.

  “No,” Pam croaked. She shook her head. Suddenly, she didn’t want to know the answers anymore. She didn’t want to know what might be in that book. She didn’t want to find the key.

  And a realization hit her: her mother was really dead, and this was her ghost that she was seeing—the same ghost that Maria had seen, the same ghost her father had seen.

  Pam turned to run towards the basement steps and then she …

  TWENTY-FOUR

  … snapped awake in her bed. The lamp was still on, but t
he bluish pre-dawn light was shining in through the windows.

  Pam threw the covers back and jumped out of bed. She half expected to see more muddy Barbie dolls in bed with her. Or flowers. Or maybe even a gold key.

  But there was nothing there.

  It had just been a nightmare.

  No, not a nightmare; there were no such things as nightmares, Dr. Stanton had told her. They were just dreams that needed to be interpreted.

  Pam stood there beside the bed and forced herself to calm down. She sat down on the edge of the bed for a moment as her heartbeat slowed back down to a normal rate and her breathing was under control again. She didn’t feel like going back to sleep now. She didn’t want to dream again.

  The memories of the dream sent shivers through her body and that now-familiar feeling of a slight electrical static buzzing on her skin.

  She had seen her mother in the dream, and her mother had seemed so real. But in the dream her mother had already been dead, wrapped up in a dirty white robe with a string of rotting flowers around her neck, with more flowers stuck in her stringy, dark hair. Her skin had been so dry—she was just a husk now.

  And she’d had the blue book in her bony hand.

  The answers are in there, her mother had told her. The book was the key.

  Was the key …

  Pam grabbed the book from the end table and leafed through it like she had done countless times now.

  What was she missing?

  She read the back cover again, and then the inside flaps of the dust jacket. She read her father’s bio underneath the black and white photo of him. In the photo, his blue eyes looked dark, but no matter what the color of the eyes were, it was still the same penetrating stare she had always remembered as a child; the stare of a doctor, of a scientist, of a hypnotist.

  Hypnotist.

  She flipped back to the Table of Contents and scanned the different case studies. Girl M had been a case involving hypnotism. She checked the introductions to several of the sections and found that they were all about radical hypnosis techniques.