The Devil in Gray

by Graham Masterton

  He had moved to Canal Walk Lofts over a year ago, but in spite of all the pictures and personal clutter that he had brought with him he still felt as if he were a stranger, living without permission in somebody else’s apartment. Come to that, he still felt as if he were living without permission in somebody else’s life.

  The walls were all painted gunmetal gray and the floor was shiny red hardwood, although it was badly scuffed in front of the chair that faced the television. The couch and the armchairs were upholstered in soft black leather, and there was a glass-and-chrome coffee table with dozens of overlapping rings on it where glasses and coffee mugs had stood. Amongst the rings stood a bronze statuette of an ecstatic naked dancer, her hair flying out behind her; as well as an enamel-plated shield from the Metro Richmond Police for marksmanship; heaps of TV Guides and Guns & Ammo and Playboy and newspapers; an ashtray from the Jefferson Hotel; and a well-thumbed copy of Your Year in the Stars: Capricorn.

  Along one wall ran a long black mahogany bookcase, crammed with a mixture of John Grisham novels and technical manuals for dismantling guns and rebuilding automobiles and step-by-step guides to Mexican and southern cookery. At the far end were ten or eleven books on mysticism and life after death, including the biography of Edgar Cayce, the famous clairvoyant, and Zora Hurston, the anthropologist who had investigated the zombie cult in Haiti.

  On the wall above the bookcase hung a huge brightly colored print of a Dutch girl sitting in a field of scarlet tulips, wearing a snow-white bonnet and bright yellow clogs. Her stripy skirt was lifted and her legs were wide apart, her vulva as scarlet as the tulips. Next to it were more nudes, darker and moodier, and three etchings of a couple entwined together. But on the other side of the room, close to the window, there was a gallery of more than twenty photographs framed in black, some of them color and some of them black-and-white. All of them showed the same dreamy-looking blonde with dark brown eyes and very long fine hair.

  Decker, as he always did, raised his glass to her.

  “Another day in paradise, baby.”

  He drew the loosely woven drapes, and then he went through to the bedroom where his king-size bed remained exactly as he had left it that morning, the sheets twisted like the Indian rope trick and the pillows all punched out of shape. He had always been a restless sleeper, prone to nightmares, and the state of the bed was a silent but eloquent record of last night’s journeys through the country of shadows—a country where faceless people murmured in his ears and strange white shapes fled ahead of him through endless arcades.

  Beside the bed stood more photographs of the dreamy-looking blonde, one of them showing her arm in arm with Decker on the pedestrian walkway under the Robert E. Lee Bridge, her right hand raised to keep the sun out of her eyes.

  Decker stripped off his clothes, dropping them onto the bed, and went through to the white-tiled bathroom. He stepped into the shower and turned it on full-blast. For some reason the Maitland case had left him feeling very tired and discouraged. All homicides were messy and disgusting, and there were always loose ends and blind alleys and confusing evidence. On its own, the disappearance of the murder weapon wouldn’t have worried him unduly. The circumstantial evidence against Jerry Maitland was overwhelming. But it was hard to imagine why he should have attacked his wife so frenziedly, and killed their unborn baby. He had a great job, an idyllic house, and everything in the world to look forward to. Unless he had violent schizophrenic tendencies that nobody had guessed at, there didn’t seem to be any motive for his actions at all.

  And then there was Sandra’s So-Scary Man in gray. Gray hat, gray coat, and wings, whatever that meant. Decker didn’t believe in ghosts and he didn’t believe in reincarnation. After Cathy’s death, he had wanted to, desperately, almost to the point of madness. He had talked to dozens of mediums and clairvoyants and read everything he could about “psychic phenomena.” Anything to touch Cathy again, anything to talk to her and smell her and wake up in the morning with her hair spread out on the pillow. Anything to tell her how sorry he was.

  But after three months of sick leave and nearly a thousand dollars of savings wasted on séances and “spirit empathy sessions,” he had come to accept that she was truly gone. He didn’t quite know how it had happened. He had been walking through Hollywood Cemetery one afternoon, where Confederate President Jefferson Davis was buried, along with eighteen thousand Confederate soldiers, and he had realized how silent it was, apart from the traffic on Route I and the endless rushing of the James River rapids. There was nobody there. No spirits, no whispers. The dead were dead and they never came back.

  One thing he had learned from his research into clairvoyance, however, was that some people were capable of faking occult phenomena. They could throw their voices, or make themselves temporarily invisible to those around them, or at least unnoticed. It was nothing supernatural, it was simply a trick, like stage magic, or hypnotism, or an optical illusion. Because of her mental disability, it was conceivable that Sandra had been unaffected by whatever gimmick the man in gray had employed to distract the attention of passersby. That was why—the more Decker thought about it—the more interested he was in seeing the figure that Sandra might draw.

  He shampooed his hair with Fix and felt the suds sliding down his back. He was beginning to relax now. One more shot of tequila as a nightcap, and he was going to bed, and to sleep, and tonight with any luck he wouldn’t have quite so many nightmares. He reached for his towel and climbed out of the shower.

  As he did so, he thought he heard a clicking sound coming from the living area. He stood still and listened. Nothing. It must have been the air-conditioning. He dried himself and went back into the bedroom. He was opening his drawer to take out a clean pair of boxer shorts when he heard it again. Click—click—click.

  He stepped into his shorts and then stood perfectly still and listened. Almost half a minute passed. Then click—click—click. And then a rattle.

  It sounded as if there were somebody in the kitchen, rather than the living area. Decker opened his closet door and took out his baseball bat. He just hoped that if it was an intruder, he hadn’t noticed that a fully loaded Colt Anaconda was hanging from the hat stand right outside the kitchen doorway.

  Click—click. Decker eased the bedroom door open a little wider and then stepped out into the living area, keeping his back close to the wall. His holster was still where he had hung it up, thank God. But the odd thing was that the front door was still locked, and the security chain was still fastened.

  He made his way across the wooden floor, trying not to make sticky noises with his warm feet. He reached the opposite wall and flattened himself against it, breathing deeply to steady himself.

  The clicking continued, intermittently. Then he heard something else, and his back prickled as if cockroaches were rushing down it. Singing. High-pitched, breathy singing. Quite tuneless, and the words were barely distinguishable. But it was singing and it was Cathy. She had always sung like that.

  Decker felt as if the entire world were tilting underneath his feet. Cathy was dead. He had seen Cathy dead. He had convinced himself that ghosts didn’t exist and spirits couldn’t be summoned back and yet here she was, singing in his kitchen in the middle of the night. It gave him a feeling of dread far greater than any intruder could have inspired. He lifted the baseball bat and his hands were shaking so much that he had to lower it again. Besides, what was he going to do, if it really was her? Hit her?

  Decker took a sharp breath and stepped into the kitchen doorway. The singing abruptly stopped and there was nobody there. He stood there for a while, not knowing what to do. He cleared his throat and said, “Cathy? Are you here, Cathy?” but of course there was no reply. He took another step forward, and sniffed, in the hope that he might be able to smell her, that distinctive flowery perfume she always wore, but there was no trace of it.

  He peered around the corner of the kitchen toward the brightly lit countertop next to the sink. On top of his se
asoned-oak chopping board there was a pattern of pale, glistening lumps. At first Decker couldn’t understand what he was looking at, but with a growing sense of eeriness he realized that it was a face, with staring eyes and jagged teeth—not a real face, but a face that had been fashioned out of slices of raw chicken, with a pointed breastbone for a nose, two slices of banana for eyes, and teeth made from diced-up apple.

  It was unsettlingly lifelike, and the way it was looking at him made him feel as if it were just about to speak. But who had created it, and why, and how? A small sharp knife lay beside the chopping board, but whoever had used it had completely vanished.

  Decker paced slowly up and down the kitchen, waving his baseball bat from side to side, as if it might come into contact with somebody invisible. Again, he whispered, “Cathy? Are you here, sweetheart? Talk to me, Cathy.” But there was still no reply, only the mournful hooting of a ship on the river.

  He went back into the living area and checked behind the drapes. The windows were closed and locked, so nobody could have escaped by climbing out that way. Besides, it was a sixty-foot drop to the street. He went back to the bedroom and opened all of the closet doors. Nobody. He frowned down at the photo of Cathy beside the bed. “Was that you? Or am I going out of my mind?”

  He returned to the kitchen. He stared at the chicken-meat face for a while but he had no idea what significance it had, if it had any significance at all. He thought of Jerry Maitland, saying, “There was nobody there … there was cutting and cutting but there was nobody there.”

  He wondered if he ought to call Hicks to take a look, but he decided against it. Hicks needed his sleep and—besides—Decker didn’t want to give the impression that he was losing his grip. He had seen it happen too many times before, detectives subtly falling apart. Their breakdowns were mostly caused by the steady erosion of suppressed grief, after one of their partners had been killed; or after their marriages had broken up, and they had lost custody of their children; or after they had been called out to one too many grotesquely mutilated bodies. They always thought that they were keeping their emotions under control, while all of their fellow officers could see that they were as brittle as an automobile whose bodywork had rusted right through to the paint.

  Decker took his Polaroid camera out of the bookcase, loaded it with film, and took six or seven pictures of the kitchen counter. Then he cleared all the meat and fruit into the sink, and pushed them into the waste disposal. The knife he picked up by the tip and dropped into a plastic food bag.

  He looked around the kitchen one more time. He cleared his throat and said, “Cathy, sweetheart, if what I heard was really you, why don’t you give me a sign? Why don’t you tell me why you’re here? Why don’t you let me see you for a minute? Why don’t you let me touch you?”

  He waited but there was no answer and no sign. Maybe he was going crazy. Maybe he was simply overtired.

  In the end he switched the lights off and went to bed.

  As soon as he fell asleep the nightmares began. Nightmares more frightening than any he had ever had before.

  He dreamed that he was struggling through thick, lacerating underbrush. It was nearly dark and he knew that he had to hurry. Off to his left he could see fires burning, and he could hear men shouting to each other.

  The branches caught in his clothing and lashed against his face. His feet were bare and every step was prickly with briars. The fires began to leap up higher, and he could smell smoke on the wind, and hear the crackling of burning bushes.

  He was shaking with exhaustion, but he knew that if he stopped for even a minute the fires would cut him off, and he also knew that there was somebody close behind him, somebody who wanted to do him serious harm. He looked over his shoulder. He couldn’t see anybody, but he was sure that they were very close behind.

  Somewhere ahead of him, in the gathering darkness, a hoarse voice called out, “Muster at the road, boys! Muster at the road or we’re finished!”

  He heard a rattling that sounded like rifle shots, and a man screaming. How could he muster at the road when he didn’t even know where the road was? He couldn’t see anything but densely tangled undergrowth and thornbushes.

  He tried to go faster by leaping over the bushes in awkward galumphing bounds, but his face was ripped by the branches and he was terrified of having an eye torn out. He lifted one arm in front of his face to protect himself. His woolen mittens were snared by briars, and his fingers were scratched, but it was preferable to being blinded.

  The fires were coming closer, and he felt gusts of furnace-like heat. Another man was screaming, and then another. Then he heard something else: a thick rustling noise, very close behind him, very close. Somebody was catching up with him fast.

  He turned around, and a huge figure in a dark cloak was almost on top of him. It came rushing toward him and it didn’t stop, so that it collided with him. He found himself struggling in a cage of bones, trapped, unable to get free. The cloak closed around him and he was imprisoned in airless darkness, desperately trying to disentangle himself from ribs and shoulder blades and knobbly vertebrae.

  “Can’t breathe!” he screamed. “Can’t breathe!”

  He twisted around and realized that he was lying on his bed with his sheet over his face, thrashing his arms and kicking his legs.

  Panting, sweating, he sat up. He switched on the bedside light and he could see himself in the mirror that faced the end of the bed, pale-faced, with his hair sticking up like a cockerel. His throat was dry—almost as dry as if he really had been running away from a brushfire. He reached for the glass of water that he usually left on his nightstand, but tonight he had forgotten it. He said, “Shit,” and swung his legs out of bed. It was then that he realized that his feet were lacerated. They were covered in dozens of small scratches, all the way up to his calves, and his sheets were spotted with blood.

  More than that, there were several briars still sticking in his ankles.

  Whoa, he thought. This is getting dangerously close to insanity. You can’t catch briars in your feet from running through underbrush in a nightmare, no matter how vivid that nightmare might have been.

  He put on his glasses and went through to the bathroom, hobbling a little. He switched on the light over the bathroom mirror. His face was scratched, too. There was a nasty little cut on the side of his nose, and the skin on his right cheek had been torn in three diagonal stripes.

  Pulling out a Kleenex, he carefully dabbed the scratches on his face. Then he sat down on the toilet seat and plucked the briars from out of his feet. He sprayed aftershave on the wounds because he didn’t have any antiseptic, sucking in his breath when it stung.

  He stayed in the bathroom for almost five minutes, wondering if he ought to go back to bed. Like, what if he went back into the same nightmare and the brushfire caught up with him? He could be burned to death in his own bed. He had read about religious fanatics who had identified so strongly with the suffering of Christ that stigmata had opened in their feet and the palms of their hands, and their foreheads had appeared to be scratched by a crown of thorns. Maybe this was a similar kind of phenomenon.

  At last he stood up and went back into the bedroom. He had to take control of this situation. He desperately needed to sleep, and he couldn’t let his subconscious fears start ruling his life. “I’m not going crazy,” he announced. “I’m probably suffering from delayed grief and work-related stress, but I am definitely not going crazy.” He paused, and then he said, “Shit, I’m talking to myself. How crazy is that?”

  He eased himself back into bed, but this time he left the light on. It made him feel as if he were a child again, terrified of what might be hiding in the dark. When he was five or six, he had imagined that the parchment-colored lining of his bedroom drapes was the skin of a tall, thin, mummified man, and that as soon as the light was switched off, the mummy would unfold itself and stalk across the room, stilt-legged, to take out his eyes.

  At about 3:30, he fell as
leep again. He dreamed that he and Cathy were walking together through the Hollywood Cemetery. It was late evening and the sky was a grainy crimson color. The crosses and urns and headstones looked like chess pieces in a complicated board game, and Decker was sure that when his back was turned they kept shifting their position. He kept trying to look at Cathy, but for some reason her face was always blurred and out of focus.

  “What were you doing in the kitchen?” he asked her. His voice sounded oddly muffled.

  “I was protecting you,” she replied.

  “Protecting me? Protecting me from what?”

  “From Saint Barbara. Saint Barbara wants her revenge.”

  “Saint Barbara? What the hell are you talking about? What I have ever done to upset Saint Barbara?”

  “I don’t want you to know. I don’t want you to find out.”

  “Cathy, listen to me. Tell me that I’m not going crazy.”

  She said nothing, but turned away from him. He reached out to take hold of her shoulder, but she collapsed, like an empty bedsheet, and when he opened his eyes, that was all he had in his hand.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The next morning was sweltering and off to the east the sky was a dark coppery color, as if an electric storm were brewing off to the east, over the Richmond Battlefield. Decker went to Sausalito’s Café on East Grace Street for coffee and scrambled eggs and sat facing the window, watching the passersby. For some reason that he couldn’t explain, the world seemed to be altered, as if the streets downtown had been hurriedly dismantled and reconstructed during the night and some of the details hadn’t been put back exactly as they should be. He had always thought that mailbox was on the opposite side of the intersection, yet here it was, right in front of the window. Even the passersby looked unnatural, walking in a hurried, self-conscious way like extras on a movie set. Decker could have believed that he was still in a nightmare.