by Noel Hynd
Nightmares. The recurrent nightmares of his youth. When he was a kid he had a few of them. Some recurring. He hadn’t thought of them for years.
And now the room before him went almost blank. Instead, he could see the terrors of when he was a boy.
He was certain. Whatever was in this room, whatever force that he was facing, it was putting on a display of power. It was so powerful that it could get into his head and guide his thoughts.
“Please. Go away,” Van Allen said.
He spoke boldly. Inside, he was terrified. He stood and hoped the dislodged spirit couldn’t read all his thoughts. But actually, it could.
The first nightmare:
He was a boy again, sleeping in a small comfortable room in Palo Alto. He emerged from bed and ran to the top of the steps in the Van Allen family’s rambling old house. He took a flying, spinning leap into the air, soared above the staircase and always woke up before his feet touched the ground …
The second one. Pure terror this time.
In his dream, he walked through the same childhood house, feeling abandoned. He searched everywhere for his mother. Then he found her. She was lying motionless on a sofa in the library, an old cloth coat pulled up to her chin. She was lifeless. Her head turned toward him, and she smiled. Then her face dissolved into something horrible the face of a monster, the face of something inhuman.
In the chair where he sat, he twisted in anguish.
Then a third dream rose up from an unknown somewhere, a refinement of the dream he had endured less than an hour earlier:
He was standing in some sort of burial ground and it was night. Above him, the stars burned like small torches. The moon was a ghostly bonfire. His feet were riveted to the earth, and all around him there were tombstones, which began to sway. They transmogrified themselves from granite and marble to something lighter than air and they became ghostly presences. Demons perhaps! — or were they angels? — and they transformed themselves into spirits all around him. Laughing. Taunting. Same as in his own apartment in Pasadena right now. A hell of a nightmare from his youth, except…
His eyes opened. A hell of a nightmare from his youth, except he was certain that this wasn’t something out of his youth, at all. It seemed horribly familiar, but he suspected it was a vision. A flash forward, not a flash back.
His gaze drifted to the floor again, where the pencil had come to rest.
“Oh…” he muttered. The pencil was gone. It was back up on top of the desk again. It had lifted itself back up via that invisible hand again while Van Allen had been wrestling with visions from the past and the future.
Van Allen spoke bravely to whatever presence was there.
“I want to see you,” Van Allen said. “If you’re here, I want to see you.”
A beat. Nothing happened. He waited. A moment of tension and anticipation dissolved into nothing. The only sound Van Allen was aware of was the rhythmic thumping of his heart in his chest.
His eyes raged with fatigue. They burned the way skin burns against a Valley sun. He closed his eyes for a moment and brought his hand to his face.
Van Allen rubbed his face. Then something else happened in the room. His eyes were closed so he didn’t see it, but he knew he felt it. It was as if he were surrounded by a crowd of people, and they were staring at him and holding their collective breath at once.
It was as if they were waiting to get his attention. He could almost hear mumbling around him. Distant, disconcerted discordant voices, like a party going on in a room down the hall. Even laughter. A music from an old player piano. That’s what it sounded like.
Slowly he pulled his wet hand from his face. He could feel his scalp tightening and the hair rising on the back of his neck. Now he knew that he was not alone. He felt himself age ten years on the spot.
“Oh, my good God…” he mumbled.
What was confronting him was a ghost, and Van Allen accepted that as the new reality of what was opposing him.
A ghost.
Somewhere in the room with him, except he couldn’t see it.
A ghost!
And the worst part about it was that it all seemed so normal. Within the context of everything else that had transpired, so logical.
A moment passed. A big loud empty nothing. Perspiration burst again from the policeman’s forehead, this time as if someone had opened a thousand tiny hoses.
Van Allen wasn’t able to speak. There remained a dreamlike, surreal quality to all of this, much akin to one of those bad dreams in which one is riveted in place with a great menace approaching, but one is unable to move or scream.
Van Allen also felt as if some force had captured him, as if a giant hand were wrapped around him. Yet, Van Allen knew this was real!
“Tell me what you want,” the policeman asked.
The ghost laughed. Van Allen was sure, because he knew he heard laughter from somewhere. Laughter that surrounded him. Then the laughing stopped and the ghost moved. But he didn’t float or drift. Instead, it rushed directly at Van Allen.
A message arrived as if by telepathy.
“I want justice. I want a murderer!” the ghost said.
Van Allen’s heart felt as if it were beating like a kettledrum in the back of his throat. From somewhere, he managed to find his voice. It creaked when he tried to use it, but he managed words.
“So do I,” he said. “If there’s a killer, I want him.”
“Then go to the cemetery,” the ghost said. “The Cemetery of Angels.”
“It’s the middle of the night.”
The protestation must have angered the spirit. Van Allen thought he saw something shimmer or flicker out of the corner of his eye. But when he turned fully toward it, the image was gone. Simultaneously, there was movement on Van Allen’s desktop. The Ticonderoga pencil flipped violently into the air and clattered onto the floor again.
“You will be admitted to San Angelo,” the ghost said.
“I…”
“Go! “ the spirit roared. A lamp flew from a table and crashed onto the floor.
Then Van Allen picked up the vibration of extreme passion and sexual energy as well as a consuming anger. His eyes were riveted upon the place in the room where he thought the ghost might have appeared. Then, like dawn purging the shadows of the night, the tone of the room seemed to suddenly change.
Van Allen got the impression that the ghost was gone.
For several seconds, Van Allen stood in the room, feeling more alone than he had ever felt in his life. He was stricken with the suspicion: had this really happened?
Had he hallucinated? All the breakage that littered his home, had he done that himself in an unprecedented turbulent dream?
But as soon as he entertained those ideas there was a sharp rap in the room. A desk drawer shot open, and Van Allen again felt the icy fingers caressing the nape of his neck. Whatever this ghost was, wherever it had come from, it had a way of reading Van Allen’s thoughts.
That idea terrified him.
He glanced at his desk. The pen still lay where he had left it, broken in half sitting in a white saucer. A few drops of ink still ran from it, like dark blood from a drained corpse.
He saw something at his feet. He leaned over.
He picked up the Ticonderoga pencil. Then he dropped it. It felt like dry ice; it was so cold that it burned his hand. He let it roll off the desk again, and again it clattered to the floor, a resonance of sound and a resonance of action.
The pencil dropping repeating itself. From somewhere came the command again, imploring this time, moaning!
“Go…!”
Van Allen reached to his car keys and hefted them in his hand.
“All right,” the policeman said softly. “I’m going.”
He went to his car. The Pontiac sounded like an irritated prematurely awakened beast when Van Allen turned over the engine at 4:15 A.M. Moments later, he was on the freeway leading out toward the city.
A thousand associations bombar
ded him as he drove wildly through the Los Angeles night the way this city’s idiosyncrasies unraveled and expanded the same way the Pacific Ocean curled and unfurled against the city’s western borders, and the way the desert pressed in from the east.
The way every bloody quirk of the landscape and the population had been made familiar to the entire world thanks to television and films. And yet, crunch all of that up and shove it into a basket, and it couldn’t match what was transpiring this evening when a dead man had risen to call him, to issue him a summons, to request that he, Ed Van Allen, step into their world.
Half an hour later, he stood before the gates to San Angelo Cemetery. He placed a hand on the iron bars and pushed. There was give to it. Martinez’s chains, however, held the gate firm.
Van Allen stared beyond the gate. The graveyard was enveloped by darkness, but a few tombstones were clear. Solid granite sentries in the night.
Guarding what? He wondered.
“Come in and find out, Edmund!”
Van Allen placed his hands along the iron bars of the gate again and felt something strange. The bars grew cold, as if hit by a strong blast of Arctic air. It seemed to be so greatly localized, and it was happening right before him.
It reminded him of another recent feeling. He thought about it for a moment and then quickly realized: It was cold the way the pencil had been cold. Like dry ice. He pulled his hand away before his skin burned.
Then he recoiled.
The chains, like the books and desk objects in his apartment and, for that matter, like his ankle an hour earlier, were jolted by a force that Van Allen could not see.
The chains pulled backward before his eyes and shook violently. They snapped and broke, falling away. They hit the ground hard and with a clunk.
Van Allen reached forward and pushed. He was in the Cemetery of Angels. He moved forward with caution, drawn, he assumed, by forces that he could never explain.
He felt the asphalt and stone of the entrance path beneath his feet, and then the soft wet turf as he stepped onto the grass. As his eyes adjusted to the night within the cemetery yard, tombs and markers emerged more visibly, now looking like sturdy steadfast phantoms guarding their stretch of this world.
He moved forward. He knew exactly where he was headed. Toward the upended headstone of Billy Carlton. The fallen broken angel.
He approached it carefully.
As he neared the fallen marker, his senses sharpened. Once again, he re-entered what he thought of as the cold zone, which seemed to accompany the presence of the ghost.
He neared the marker, seeking answers to his questions, wondering how this would bring him to a killer, how this would resolve any crime that had crossed his desk.
He didn’t know. What he did know, however, was that by the bulky foot of the overturned angel, he began to discern three figures, one large, two small.
By all that was holy, he could not believe what he was seeing. Yet there it was, or there they were, right in front of him: something from the world of spirits that had invaded the world of the living.
The three figures were shimmering, much like beams of light rising from the ground. Van Allen stopped for a moment, steadied himself, and then continued to approach.
The three figures took human form. He recognized the first, because he had studied the photograph of Billy Carlton that he had seen in the film encyclopedia. And the smaller two he recognized from the pictures on his desk, as well as hundreds of police fliers and the pictures in Mr. and Mrs. Moore’s home at 2136 Topango Gardens.
Van Allen came to within twenty feet and felt that he should stop. If he came too close, they might vanish. He might have been right. The adult ghost turned to him and smiled. There was something wrong with the adult’s eyes. They glowed like a pair of little nightlights.
The children appeared more normal. Patrick Moore raised a hand and waved to the police officer. Karen did the same. There they were. The Moore children.
Dead? Alive?
Van Allen didn’t know. But they were with their kidnapper. Then all three fixed their eyes upon Van Allen. They stared at him with expressionless, grave faces, as if quietly to impress upon him the issue of what to do next. And a final bolt of utter terror shot through him as he realized that all three — the two children hand in hand with the ghost of Billy Carlton — were floating about twelve inches above the ground.
Van Allen stared back. The exchange became lost in time. Later, as he thought back on it, Van Allen could recall that he remained physically frozen, other than to back up and sit upon a small gravestone as he studied the vision.
Eventually, the policeman held out his hand, as if to ask the ghost if he would release the children. In response, the ghost’s eyes steamed slightly, resonating with a fierce angry glow, and a message came to Van Allen from somewhere.
The message was clear:
“I want the killer.”
“What killer?” Van Allen asked. “Who?”
The ghost turned away again then looked back. Same with Patrick and Karen. The tableau seemed to freeze and close. Van Allen’s final image was that of watching the three figures until the sky lightened, staying perched on the convenient tombstone.
Then, before his eyes, as dawn arrived, the vision faded and was gone. At that time, Van Allen found himself looking at nothing.
He finally rose. He glanced at his watch. It was twenty minutes to six. He reasoned — if normal reason applied — that he had been in the cemetery for an hour and a half. He walked to the overturned angel, examined it, and felt the pang in his calf where he had injured himself. He put a toe to the granite to test its mass and found that the marker was substantial.
He tried to see what he could have seen other than a ghost, what bizarre reflection or quirk in the universe might have been there. But there was nothing. The same as the night when he thought he had seen the intruder in San Angelo, but had been unable to find anyone.
Van Allen turned, consumed by tiredness. He trudged back to the gates. The chain was still on the ground where it had fallen. He left the cemetery and pulled the gates closed, his head awash in erratic, contradictory, fatigue driven thoughts. He put the broken chain around a couple of the bars. There was no way he could lock it.
Then he found his way to the bench outside Martinez’s guardhouse. He sat down. He leaned back and closed his eyes. He quickly drifted into sleep.
This time the dreams were peaceful.
He was a boy again, and his parents were alive, and he realized how much he had loved them and now missed them, and how fervently he prayed that their souls were in a good place, protected by a benevolent God; he was in a field playing catch with his father until his father threw a high fly ball in the air, and Van Allen ran over, dived for the ball and speared it in the webbing of his Steve Garvey baseball glove as he fell. His shoulder hit the ground hard, which caused him to shudder as he dozed. And then a hand was upon that same shoulder, shaking him, just as the hand had grabbed his ankle in the dream earlier that morning.
In the dream, it was his father’s hand. When he opened his eyes, however, it was Martinez. The old caretaker looked down on him with kindly eyes.
The benevolent old Mexican leaned back slightly, waited and then smiled. He nodded slightly.
“Ghost, hmm?” he asked. “You seen a ghost?” Van Allen, blinking awake, answered.
“Yeah. Yes. I did…? How did you know?”
“Happens all the time in this place,” Martinez said. “All the time. Ghosts all over the cemetery. No one believes until they see one themselves. You know?”
Van Allen thought about it long and hard.
“I know,” he answered.
Chapter 44
One afternoon later, the man and the woman sat in the down stairs of the home at 2136 Topango Gardens. The man was not her husband.
“I’m trying to understand this,” Ed Van Allen said to his former suspect.
“You and me, both,” Rebecca said.
She nodded.
“The children came up with the name at their blackboard. Wasn’t that how you explained it?” he asked.
She said it was. She led the detective through it again. The ghost had come into the kids’ rooms one night to introduce himself. He had Karen write the letters on the board. Then the kids had unscrambled. The ghost had taken great glee, Karen had reported at the time, in throwing the letters into a jumble.
“Another typical poltergeist trick,” Rebecca said. “That’s what my friend Melissa always said.” Van Allen considered it for a moment.
“I wonder,” he said. “Could I look at that blackboard again? The one the children had those scrambled letters on?”
“Why not?” Rebecca asked. “It’s going to prove what we already know, isn’t it?”
“Probably,” said Van Allen. They climbed the stairs and went to Patrick’s room. The chalkboard was where they had left it.
Van Allen took his notepad from his pocket and wrote the letters upon a fresh page. At first, he copied them exactly as they appeared on the board.
RLLIBOTACLYN
Then he extracted the ghost’s accepted name: Ronny. That left a residue of letters:
LLIBTACL
He spelled it out phonetically, the way the kids had pronounced it. He remixed it and came up with the letters that the ghost had actually intended:
BILLY CARLTON
He eased back from his assignment. Rebecca looked at him and nodded.
“Ever been to a place called ‘The Silent Movie’?” Van Allen asked. She frowned.
“What is it?”
“The world’s only authentically restored silent movie theater,” said Van Allen. “They show restored silent films on three evenings a week. It’s located on Fairfax Avenue. I asked them to keep me apprised if certain films came around.”