The Laughterhouse

by Paul Cleave

“You need a hand?” I ask him.

  “I don’t know much about cars,” he tells me, climbing out of it. He must be around fifty, with a thick head of gray hair that is flattened down.

  “Nor do I,” I admit, “but I’ve got a set of jumper cables that might do the trick.”

  I open the trunk of my car and fish out the cables. We pop the hoods and attach our respective ends. I think if there was a competition to see who had the worse car, we’d both win. I start my car and my engine barely turns over, and for a second I think we could both be stranded here, but then it catches and I put my foot on the accelerator a few times.

  I walk around my car while the other guy climbs into his. It takes a couple of tries, but then his engine starts. He guns it a few times, then climbs out and from the light of the cars I can get a better look at him. He looks like he’s been beaten up, not recently, but a long time ago, and many times too. We unhook the cable and I wrap it up and throw it into the trunk.

  “I appreciate it,” he says.

  “No problem,” I say, and instinct kicks in, and next thing I know I’m offering him my hand.

  He looks at it for a few seconds. He seems unsure what to do, and I’m starting to feel like an idiot, but then he reaches out and shakes it. I shake his back, and he winces a little.

  I quickly let go. “Sorry,” I tell him.

  “Not your fault,” he says, massaging his fingers. “Just an old injury.”

  “Well, don’t be surprised if you have to return the favor in the next day or two,” I say, looking at my car.

  “I’m not even sure the car is going to last another day or two,” he answers.

  The moment is over, and it’s nice to have met a stranger who wasn’t a jerk and who, at this time of night, wasn’t trying to steal my wallet. We both acknowledge the moment and climb into our cars. He gives a small wave as he drives away, then I’m back on the street, feeling good about helping somebody.

  It’s one o’clock when I get home. I kick off my shoes and put them next to the radiator hoping they’ll be dry by morning. I fire up the computer and heat the remaining half of a supermarket pizza from a few days ago because the burger only helped out for a few minutes. I make some coffee. I haven’t eaten anything healthy since coming out of prison and see no reason to break the tradition. I lost eighteen pounds behind bars and none of them seem to be coming back-without my shirt on I look like a corpse.

  I sit down in my study, where articles about Melissa X are pinned to the walls, photographs of her when she was Natalie Flowers. There are crime scene reports filed around the room in chronological order. Her icy blue eyes stare out at me from different images, they are the only thing identical between the two personalities, the rest changed with makeup, hair colors, and three years of killing.

  I turn my back on Melissa and search for today’s victims online. The stories have hit the news, but not their names, although victim one, Herbert Poole, comes up from cases in his past, and victim two, Albert McFarlane, has a story of when he retired from school, students thanking him and wishing him the best. Schroder has already confirmed the lawyer victim two used for his divorce wasn’t victim one. The connection must be somewhere else.

  I shut the computer down and head to the lounge. I lie on the couch and watch the news. I have the beginnings of a headache that I don’t think is going to take hold. I rub the side of my head and it fades a little as I watch a woman in her early thirties with a big smile and straight hair look into the camera and open the proceedings. Two old people murdered on the same day, and the media are throwing around the serial killer label. They already have a name for him-The Gran Reaper. I grimace at the name, wondering who the hell comes up with them so quickly, whether the media machine churning out the doom and gloom have some geeky guy stashed in a basement office earning minimum wage just for these occasions. If they do, then with his latest effort they should be paying him less. There is footage from the scenes, but there’s no mention of drunk detectives showing up. I’m grateful, but not as grateful as Schroder and the others will be-he and his work buddies seem to have dodged a bullet and kept their jobs. At least for now.

  Knowing the media, it may only be a matter of time.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Caleb’s next stop is two suburbs over, a house on a dead-end street where the neighbors seem to be making the best of what they have: old homes with tidy yards, cracked windows but all of them clean, patchy paint but none of it hanging in flakes, the bare wood sanded back. He parks outside the woman’s house and even though nobody would want to steal his car, he locks it anyway. Hell, they’d have to get it to start first. He leaves the knife under the passenger seat.

  The pathway up to the doorstep is lined with broken sunflowers, their thick stems bent from the last strong wind, some of them missing except for the stumps, others still attached and lying limp on the lawn. A dog next door is running the length of the fence, its paws scrabbling against it, but it doesn’t bark. He reaches the front door. He rings the doorbell and is unsure if it’s broken or if he just can’t hear it. Just when he’s getting ready to knock, a woman swings it open, offering him a large smile painted on in bright red lipstick.

  “Right on time,” she says, smiling at him. “Come on through.”

  Right on time is one o’clock in the morning, and he guesses she thinks that makes her readings more authentic. He follows her into a room darkened by thick purple curtains. The house smells of whatever was cooked for dinner, some kind of chicken dish. The woman is wearing a scarf over her hair, a velvet dress that reaches the floor, and has tattoos on her hands that he can’t make out. In her early fifties, he knows thirty years ago she could have been quite beautiful. Except for her hand-her right hand is disfigured, the fingers all pointing back at her body, looking like a claw. He’s not sure if she was born that way, had an accident, or if she’s faking a disability to add to her persona.

  “Sit,” she tells him, and points to a chair.

  The room is illuminated by two lamps from opposing corners. There is a bookcase jammed with titles, words like afterlife and spirits adorning many of them. The table they sit at is a card table with black cloth draped across it and nothing else. There’s a couch against the wall and a cat sitting flat along the arm of it. It stares at him, as if reading his mind, something he hopes he doesn’t have to pay for at the end of the session. There’s a vase full of incense burning by the window.

  This is his first time here, but his fourth time in a similar environment. The other three psychics he’s seen all did readings from their homes, outfits the same but different shades of dark, books by the same authors, and lighting just as dim. They had similar ways of contacting the dead. He is hoping this woman will be more genuine.

  “Give me your hands,” she says.

  So far it’s the same. He reaches over the table, his left hand somewhat hesitant as her clawed one embraces it.

  “There is a lot of pain inside you,” she tells him, but she isn’t summoning a spirit to tell her that, it’s written and scarred in his features. “I sense,” she says, then cocks her head slightly, her eyes closed, and he can tell she’s trying hard to listen to something. He stares at her, wanting to believe it’s real. “I sense you have lost somebody close to you,” she says. “Is that right?”

  He nods, then realizes she can’t see him. “Yes,” he says.

  “Your wife?”

  “Yes,” he says again, hoping she isn’t just guessing.

  She scrunches her eyes tighter. The other psychics had stopped with the wife. They didn’t figure out his children were dead too. This one is focusing. . focusing. .

  “I sense there is more pain,” she adds. “You loved your wife very much. Was there. . somebody else too?”

  It’s an open question, but he takes it because he wants to believe. “Yes.”

  “I’m sensing somebody younger,” she says, and when he says nothing she tightens the grips on his hands, the good hand stronger than
the claw, and thinks for a few more seconds. “Somebody quite younger.”

  “My daughter,” he says, then feels stupid for supplying her with that information. He’s overeager.

  “Yes, yes,” she says, “I sensed a young girl. Very beautiful. Your daughter.”

  He nods, knowing she can’t see him but keeps nodding anyway. “Yes,” he says, and doesn’t mention his son.

  “It was some time ago,” she says. “Is that right?”

  “Yes,” he answers, still eager but more suspicious now. The way she says things, it’s like she’s fishing for information more from the living than from the dead.

  “And you’ve come to me to try and talk to them,” she says.

  She opens her eyes and looks at him. “A lot of pain,” she says, “for everybody involved. No?”

  He nods.

  “And you have come here for what reason?” she asks. “To talk to them? To tell them you miss them?”

  “I want them to know how sorry I am,” he says. “I let them down. Can you tell them?”

  She smiles at him. “You can tell them yourself,” she says. “There is somebody here,” she says, and she looks over his shoulder. It’s so believable that he glances back, but all that’s there is the couch and the cat and the door to the hallway.

  The woman closes her eyes again. “Yes, I definitely sense somebody here,” she says. She tilts her head to the other side now, and he’s not sure which part of the room the spirit-if there is one-is in.

  “A woman is here,” she says. “I. . I can’t quite see her clearly. A beautiful woman. Your wife. She. . she is sad she left you. It was sudden, sudden for both your wife and daughter.”

  “Yes.”

  “Some kind of accident,” she says. “I can’t. . can’t quite make it out.”

  “Something like that.”

  “There was a lot of pain there.”

  “I miss them,” he says.

  “She can hear you,” she says. “She says she misses you.”

  “Can you. .”

  “Wait,” she says, tightening the grips on his hands. “Wait, she is telling me something. She has to go, but there’s something she wants me to tell you. Yes, yes,” she says, nodding and listening enthusiastically, and then, “yes, I understand. I’ll tell him.”

  She opens her eyes. “She’s gone,” she tells him.

  “Gone?”

  “Gone. But she gave me a message. She wants you to know that her pain is gone, that she and your daughter are together, that they love you, that she wants you to be happy.”

  He pulls his hands away. The woman flinches, her eyes widening as she realizes she has said something wrong. “Sometimes the messages can be vague,” she tells him. “Sometimes it can take a few attempts.”

  He hands over the eighty dollars she told him over the phone that it would cost and it disappears into her claw. She walks him to the front door. He didn’t see them on the way in, but on the way out there’s a set of suitcases packed next to the door, on top of them a pair of passports and a set of tickets. Later tonight or tomorrow she’s leaving the country with her husband or partner and he remembers the holiday with his wife twenty-five years ago, lots of sun and great food and nice wine and nine months after that they had a daughter.

  “My wife,” he tells her, “would never want me to be happy. She blames me for what happened-she always will.”

  She nods slowly, and he guesses that’s what being a psychic is all about-learning from your mistakes. He expects her to defend herself, to tell him he’s wrong and his wife does want him to be forgiven, wants him to be happy, but she says nothing and slowly closes the door.

  He should have known.

  The car starts up on the first try. He pulls away from the house without glancing back. Playtime is over. It’s time to move on to the next victim. She’s going to be the easiest-after all, she’s the only one on the list who’s in a coma.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  My phone goes off and it’s the first I’ve realized I’ve fallen asleep on the couch, still dressed in my funeral suit. I look at my watch. It’s two o’clock. I’ve only been asleep for ten minutes. The news has ended and there’s an infomercial on TV, some new piece of must-have fitness equipment that folds down and slides under your bed so you don’t have to feel embarrassed about it when the neighbors come around. The woman displaying it has more abs than I have nutrients floating around inside my body. I check the caller ID. It’s Schroder. Either he’s ringing to tell me I can work on the case, or I can’t.

  “I’ve spoken to the powers that be,” he tells me.

  “And?”

  “And I reminded them when it comes to serial killers, you have a knack for looking in the right places, even if you do go about it the wrong way.”

  “And?”

  “And they reminded me that your success rate comes with a homicide rate.”

  “The first was an accident,” I say, “and the second one killed himself.” The first one is partly true and partly not true. The latter is also made up from the same parts. Schroder knows this, can’t prove it, and wouldn’t want to even if he could.

  “You’re on the case,” he says. “Not as a cop, but as an official consultant.”

  “That’s all I was hoping for at this point.”

  “Yeah. If it goes well-hell, maybe this is your chance to get back on the force.”

  “Yeah, sucks that my chance comes about by two people dying.”

  “Three,” he says.

  “What?”

  “That’s why I’m calling you now and not in the morning, and this is why we need all the help we can get. We’ve got a third victim.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “Christchurch hospital. He’s hanging on. Could go either way. Meet me there five minutes ago.”

  The traffic is sparse, ninety percent of it made up of taxis ferrying the drunk. It thickens around the hospital where there’s been an accident outside the main entrance, a boy-racer has jumped the curb and knocked down a lamppost, pinning somebody inside his car. The parking lot is mostly empty and I don’t drop any coins in the meter. I head to the emergency department and it’s full of people who have fallen over drunk and hurt themselves. I call Schroder and he comes through the security doors to meet me.

  “Nice shoes,” he says, looking down at my running sneakers.

  “You too,” I say, looking down at his running sneakers, which, like mine, are probably the only thing he had that was dry. He’s also changed into a new shirt. “We can be shoe buddies. So, does being a consultant come with a wage?”

  Schroder shrugs. “It does, but don’t ask me what it is. Hell, maybe it’ll be more than what I make.”

  We head back through the doors. There’s a series of intersecting corridors and people have probably died in here looking for the right place to be. Doctors and nurses are walking about in a hurry, patients are in cubicles behind curtains, voices and tears and laughter coming from different ones.

  We follow the corridor to a small foyer with chairs where two women are sitting down, one doing the crying, one doing the comforting. The first the wife, the second a neighbor or friend. We stop thirty feet short of them so we can talk without them hearing.

  “It’s bad,” Schroder says. “Lots of internal damage, lots of blood loss. Doctor ten minutes ago said if the guy has a priest, now would be the time to call him.”

  “What happened?”

  “According to his wife he came home, parked the car, then didn’t come to bed. She got up after ten minutes to go look for him. Found him in the garage next to his car, he was holding his guts in with his fingers. He was in so much pain he couldn’t move, couldn’t even call out. By the time the ambulance arrived he was already unconscious.”

  “She see anything?”

  “Just her husband.” Schroder lowers his voice even though nobody can hear us. I can still smell beer on him. “Different type of victim, just the one stab wound and nothing
written on him, but it’s our guy.”

  “Yeah? What do you have?”

  “Killer walked across the front lawn and dragged some mud with him. Matches up with the bloody footprints back at the retirement homes. I mean an exact match, right down to gaps in the tread. It’s our guy.”

  “Well, if it is him, why is this scene so different?”

  “Theory is he panicked and fled.”

  “What else have you got?”

  “From victim three, not much. From the first two he drank coffee at each of the scenes, but he’s wiped down the cups. He’s wiped down all the surfaces he may have touched, including the bathroom. So no prints. DNA, well, we got plenty of that. Just that’s not going to be any good until the results come back.”

  “Jesus,” I say, “three people within, what, six, seven hours?” I nod toward another big set of doors, which lead to another corridor and operating rooms where right now our victim is on a table with somebody’s hands inside him. “What if he’s not our last?”

  “Victim three is Brad Hayward,” he says. “Forty-one years old, an accountant, wife with two children, all of whom were home when it happened.”

  “The kids see anything?”

  “The kids were in bed.”

  “So the extra people at the house could be why the killer didn’t hang around to make sure the job was complete.”

  “That’s the theory,” Schroder says. “So far no links to either of the other victims.”

  “So a teacher, an accountant, and a lawyer-”

  “All walk into a bar,” Schroder says, then shakes his head. “Does sound like a setup,” he adds.

  The wife has been staring at the doors the entire time, but now she looks over at us, whispers something to her friend, stands up, and comes over. She clutches at the bottom of her jacket and tugs it down, straightening it, then brushes away the tears from the front of it. Schroder introduces me but doesn’t give me a title. She nods an acknowledgment but doesn’t offer to shake hands. I feel like I’m not wanted.

  “Do you know anything yet?” she asks, directing the question at both of us.