The Devil in Gray

by Graham Masterton

  “Do you have any idea what could be causing it?”

  “I don’t know. But I started to feel it on the day that Alison Maitland was killed. I felt it even before Tim came home and told me about it.”

  She hesitated, twisting her napkin, and then she said, “I heard a noise in the nursery and I went up to make sure that Daisy was okay. There’s a long mirror on the landing and as I came up the stairs I saw somebody. Only for a split second. But it was like the mirror was an open doorway instead of a mirror and somebody walked across it, so quick that I couldn’t see who it was.”

  Hicks said, “Honey … the lieutenant’s right. This is a really gruesome case and you’re letting your imagination run away with you.”

  “But this happened before I even knew about it.”

  “Come on, honey, what you saw in the mirror, it was a trick of the light.” Hicks stood up and put his arm around her. “There was nobody there, was there?”

  “I saw somebody, I swear it.”

  “And how about this darkness that’s falling on me?” Decker asked. “Can you still see that?”

  “It’s not just the Maitland case. It’s something that happened to you a long time ago. Something that you never allow yourself to remember.”

  “What, specifically? Do you have any idea?”

  “I’m not sure. I’d have to do a reading to find that out.”

  “Oh, come on,” Hicks protested. “The lieutenant came here for supper, not for mumbo jumbo.”

  “No, I’m interested,” Decker said. “What kind of a reading?”

  “I can use an okuele.”

  “An okuele?”

  “Jesus,” Hicks said, burying his head in his hands.

  Rhoda got up from the table and went across to a small side table. She took out a carefully wrapped package of purple tissue paper. She laid it on the table and opened it up. Inside lay what looked like a necklace, eight tortoiseshell medallions connected together by a dull metal chain.

  “My grandmother taught me to use it. It’s like the tarot except that it explains the past as well as the future, and it’s much more personal than the tarot. Through the okuele, the spirits prompt you to tell them what’s troubling you, instead of the other way around.”

  Hicks sat down and stared at his half-eaten supper. “I don’t believe this. All I wanted was fried chicken and what do I get? Ghostbusters.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Rhoda cleared the table and spread a plain white cloth on it. Hicks stood on the opposite side of the kitchen with his arms folded, looking deeply unhappy. Decker said, “I’m sorry … I didn’t mean to spoil your supper. I’m not sure that I believe in this dark shadow any more than you do, but there must be some reason that Rhoda feels so strongly about it.”

  “I guess.”

  “There’s another thing … Sandra said she had a premonition, too. She said she really believed that something bad’s about to happen.”

  Hicks watched as Rhoda placed a silver-plated candlestick in the center of the table, with a tall white candle, and lit it, and arranged a sheet of paper and a pencil beside her chair. “I really don’t like this, Lieutenant. I don’t like Rhoda getting involved in my work. Especially when we’re dealing with some kind of total freaking psychopath.”

  “If she’s got some kind of intuitive feeling about it, sport, I think we need to know what it is.”

  Rhoda said, “You can sit down now. This is only a very simple reading, so that we can find out why Decker is walking in darkness.”

  Rhoda switched off all the lights so that the only illumination came from the candle, and then they sat down. “Do we have to hold hands or anything?” Decker asked.

  “No. It’s enough that we’re sitting here together.”

  Rhoda closed her eyes and said nothing for what seemed like forever, although it was probably no more than two or three minutes. Hicks glanced at Decker in discomfort, but neither of them spoke in case they disturbed Rhoda’s concentration. There was no draft in the room, and the candle flame burned steady and bright, without wavering.

  At last, Rhoda tossed the okuele onto the table. Some of the medallions fell with their shiny side upward, others with their dull side upward. All of the medallions were marked on their shiny side with the sign of the cross. Rhoda picked up her pencil and marked a line of crosses and zeroes.

  She picked up the okuele and threw it again, and again she marked down the way that the medallions had fallen. She repeated this process four times.

  At last she said, “Something terrible happened and you won’t allow yourself to remember it. Your mind has closed its eyes and it refuses to open them.”

  Decker said nothing. He didn’t know what she meant. What had he ever refused to remember?

  Rhoda hesitated a moment more, and then she said, “It’s raining, and you’re standing outside a black door. Do you remember that?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so. I mean, I must have stood outside hundreds of black doors.”

  “It’s dark. The number on the black door has two fours and a seven.”

  Decker uneasily sat back. “I remember, 1447 Duval Street, five years ago. We were on a drug bust.”

  “You’re not alone. You have a partner with you.”

  “That’s right. Jim Stuart. Just made detective first grade.”

  Rhoda touched her fingertips to her ears. “You say something about the back of the house.”

  “‘Cover the back of the house. Anyone runs out into the alley, shoot first and worry about who it is afterward.’”

  Decker recited the words as if he were giving evidence. He looked at Hicks and Hicks was staring at him apprehensively, as if he were seeing a side of Decker’s personality that he had never been aware of before.

  Rhoda said, “You open the black door. You walk into the hallway. It’s very dark inside the house.”

  “I can’t see my hand in front of my face, that’s how dark it is.”

  “You feel a door handle on your left. You open it.”

  Decker didn’t say anything. He could remember opening that door because he had opened it time and time again, and wished that he hadn’t.

  “You enter the room. It’s just as dark in here. You can smell people sleeping. You raise your gun in your right hand and your flashlight in your left. Just as you switch on your flashlight, you hear the click of a gun being cocked, right behind you. You turn round. You fire.”

  “It was dark,” Decker said, hoarsely. “I told him to cover the back of the house. ‘Anybody runs out into the alley, shoot first and worry about who it is afterward.’ I specifically told him not to come inside. Specifically. A specific order.”

  Rhoda closed her eyes again and picked up the okuele, passing it through her fingers like a rosary, and gently rubbing every one of its tortoiseshell medallions.

  When she spoke, her voice was unnervingly whispery, as if she were making a guilty confession to a priest. She didn’t even sound like Rhoda. “Saint Barbara knows what you saw.”

  “Saint Barbara? What are you talking about?”

  “Saint Barbara is the shadow who is following you everywhere. She knows everything about you. She knows who your father’s father was, and what sign you were born under, because she wants her revenge. She knows every bone in your body and she knows what you saw when you shot Jim Stuart.”

  “What do you know about Saint Barbara? Hicks—did you ever tell Rhoda about Saint Barbara, that thing on my wall?”

  Hicks shook his head. “Come on, Rhoda. Enough of this shit.”

  But Rhoda stared at Decker and whispered, “Saint Barbara wants you, Decker. She knows what you saw when you shot Jim Stuart. She knows everything about you.”

  For a fraction of a second, Decker saw his flashlight jump across Jim Stuart’s startled face. Wide-eyed, because of the dark. A little blondish moustache. But his finger had already pulled the trigger and it was bang! and Jim Stuart went down.

  “It was dark. I
couldn’t see who it was. He had a specific order not to enter the house.”

  Another long silence. Rhoda’s eyes were open, but it looked to Decker as if she were focusing right past him, and listening to somebody else, because she gave occasional nods of her head.

  “Saint Barbara can see right into your soul,” she whispered, and then, in her own voice, “Not yet.” Then she turned directly to Decker and said, “There’s a spirit here … a spirit who’s trying to warn you.”

  Decker became aware that the kitchen was gradually growing colder, and he had the strangest sensation that the floor was slowly sinking beneath them, and the walls stretching, like the elevator in the haunted house in Disney World. Hicks must have experienced it, too, because he looked up toward the ceiling and then down at the floor, and then back up at the ceiling again.

  “I wish to speak to you,” Rhoda said. “I need you to tell me more about Saint Barbara.”

  The kitchen was now so cold that Decker could see his own breath. He could faintly hear a high-pitched sound, like a steel wire being drawn across the back of a saw. It grew louder and louder and higher and higher, until he could feel it in the fillings in his teeth, and his saliva started to taste salty.

  “Was it you?” Rhoda asked.

  The candle flame burned brighter. It began to burn so intensely that it hissed, and wax begun to run down it faster and faster, pouring over the candlestick and onto the tablecloth.

  “Was it you?” Rhoda repeated.

  The flame widened, and swelled out, and right in front of Decker’s eyes it formed itself into a fiery face, with hollow eyes and a mouth that was open in a silent scream.

  “Jesus,” Hicks said.

  “Speak to me,” Rhoda said. “Tell me what you want to say.”

  The face said nothing, even though its mouth was stretched wide open. But as it burned brighter, it increased in definition, so that Decker could begin to see that it was a young woman, with furiously waving hair.

  “Speak to me,” Rhoda encouraged her. “Tell me more about Saint Barbara.”

  At that instant, the young woman’s eyes opened, and she stared directly at Decker with a look of utter wildness and agony. It was Cathy. Her face was made of fire but there was no doubt about it at all. It was Cathy, and she was screaming at him soundlessly from the other side of sudden death.

  “Tell me about Saint Barbara,” Rhoda insisted.

  But then—with a soft whoomph—the face flared up into a fireball, and rolled up to the ceiling, and was gone. Decker and Rhoda and Hicks were left facing each other with only a small flickering stub of a candle between them, the shadows moving on their faces as if they were alternately smiling and scowling.

  Hicks switched on the light. “What the hell was that?” he wanted to know. “Static? St. Elmo’s fire? What?”

  Decker said, “I take it back … about not believing in ghosts. Or spirits, or whatever. That was my girlfriend Cathy.”

  “You mean—”

  “Yes. My dead girlfriend, Cathy.”

  Rhoda said, “She couldn’t say any more. It was like she was suffering too much to speak.”

  “She spoke to me the other night,” Decker said. “She warned me about Saint Barbara. Somebody painted the words Saint Barbara on my wall, too, the other night, in human blood. It wouldn’t surprise me if it was her. Or her ghost. Or whatever that was.”

  “She’s dead, Lieutenant,” Hicks put in.

  “That makes no difference,” Rhoda said, gently. “Our spirit lives on, even after we die. Sometimes, if someone died a violent death, that makes their spirit even stronger … even more determined to protect the loved ones that they left behind. Your Cathy, Lieutenant, is trying very hard to warn you of a coming danger. That is why you carry the shadow with you. You’ve been marked already, for some kind of revenge, and Cathy knows it.”

  “Rhoda,” Hicks protested, “this is my superior officer. You can’t go telling him he’s doomed or nothing.”

  “I’m sorry, but I have to. Would you stand by and say nothing if you saw that a man was going to be hit by a car?”

  Decker said, “You don’t have any idea what this ‘coming danger’ might be?”

  “Your Cathy started to appear to you when you took on the Maitland homicide, so I guess it must be connected in some way. She senses that something very bad is going to happen to you, but I don’t think that it’s an accident or illness or anything like that. I think she believes that something terrible is after you, something that goes by the name of Saint Barbara.”

  “Santería,” Decker said.

  “What?” Hicks said.

  “A saint’s name, Saint Barbara. That’s the whole thing about Santería, isn’t it? When the slaves were brought over from Africa, the slave owners wouldn’t allow them to worship their own gods, so they disguised what they were doing by calling their gods by the names of Catholic saints.”

  “That’s right,” Rhoda said. “‘Saint Barbara’ may not be Saint Barbara at all, but some god worshiped by the Santeríans.”

  “Santería?” Hicks said. “That could mean Queen Aché.”

  “Makes sense,” Decker agreed. “We definitely need to investigate that lady a whole lot closer. Although I don’t see why she should have been interested in killing the Maitlands, or Major Drewry. What the hell did they ever do to upset her?”

  “I’ll check if either of them had any business dealings with the Eguns. Gerald Maitland was into real estate, wasn’t he? It’s possible that he might have done some property deal that ruffled Queen Aché’s feathers.”

  “Okay. Look, it’s getting late. Tim—Rhoda—I feel really bad for messing up your meal.”

  Rhoda said, “Don’t. I couldn’t let you sit there with that shadow on you, and not say a word. Would you like some coffee before you go?”

  “No, thanks. I think me and my shadow will just take ourselves home. See you tomorrow, Tim.”

  That night, Decker was back in the blazing bushes, his face and his feet lacerated, and even more exhausted than before. He knew that the tall dark figure was very close behind him. He could hear him surging through the underbrush in his ankle-length greatcoat. But the heat and the smoke were searing his throat and his clothes were snarled by briars at every step and he was almost past caring.

  “Muster at the plank road, boys! Muster at the plank road!”

  He thought that he must have almost reached the plank road by now. Over the crackling and the popping of burning branches he could hear men shouting and screaming for help, and every now and then there was a brisk rattle of rifle fire. Minié balls came moaning and snapping through the scrub, and from a mile or so in the distance came the distinctive thudding of artillery.

  He turned around to see how close the tall dark figure was, but he couldn’t see it, only the fiery latticework of burning briars. Then, however, he heard a heavy rustling sound off to his left, and saw a shadowy shape moving swiftly behind the trees. The figure was outflanking him, and that meant that it would reach the plank road before he did, and cut off any hope of escape. Not only that, God alone knew what it would do to his friends and his fellows.

  “It’s coming!” he shouted out, even though his throat was raw. “Keep away from the road! It’s coming!”

  The figure stopped, and listened, and then it turned toward him. Oh, Christ, he thought. It’s heading straight for me. It’ll have my guts. He tore his tunic free from the thorns, and tried to run in the opposite direction, but already he could hear the figure coming closer and closer.

  He twisted around, spraining his ankle. As he did so, the figure was on top of him, tangling him up in knobbly bones and suffocating cloth. “Can’t breathe!” he screamed. “Can’t breathe!”

  He jolted upright. Jesus. He switched on the light and he could see himself in the mirror on the opposite side of the bedroom, his hair sticking up and his T-shirt dark with sweat.

  He eased himself out of bed. His feet were scratched and bleeding
, like before, and when he tried to stand up he found that his ankle was swollen. He hobbled into the bathroom, stripped off his T-shirt, and splashed his face with cold water.

  He no longer believed that he was hallucinating, or suffering from stress. Rhoda had shown him Cathy’s fiery face, and for Decker that was proof enough that something malevolent was after him, and that Cathy was trying to protect him from it. He had a pee and flushed the toilet, and then he went back into the bedroom to take a fresh white T-shirt out of the drawer.

  As he pulled the T-shirt over his head, he suddenly realized that his top bedsheet was missing. He ducked down and looked on the floor. He looked around the other side of the bed, but the sheet was definitely gone. “The hell,” he said, and stood perplexed in the middle of the room, trying to work out what could have happened to it.

  Keep calm, he told himself. Maybe you never had a top sheet.

  He went to the linen closet to take out another sheet. As he did so, however, he heard somebody chanting in the living area. Somebody was singing in a high, breathless voice, like Cathy’s—up, down, up, down, plangently, yet he didn’t recognize the song. It certainly wasn’t Bob Dylan, or Joan Armatrading, or any of those other singers that Cathy used to like. He limped to the bedroom door and pressed his ear against it.

  “—ko gbamu mi re oro niglati wa obinu ki kigbo ni na orin oti gbogbo—”

  He listened for a moment, and then he opened the door.

  “Cathy?” he called, and his heart was thumping hard against his ribs. “Cathy? Is that you?” The living area was totally dark. All he could hear now was the sound of traffic in the street below, and the faint whirring of the air conditioner.

  “Cathy, if that’s you, let me see you. I love you, sweetheart, and I know that you’re trying to help me.”

  There was no answer. But as Decker’s eyes became more accustomed to the darkness, he thought he could see a whitish figure standing close to the kitchen archway. He said, “Cathy?” and he was sure that he saw the figure sway from side to side. He edged across to the nearest wall, wincing on his twisted ankle, and reached for the light switches and flicked them on.