Ghost Music

by Graham Masterton

  “Please,” she said, “can we just enjoy these moments together as much as we can, without worrying about the past?”

  * * *

  By the time we returned to the Philipses’ apartment, David and Helena had already gone to bed, although they had left a lamp on for us in the living room, and Helena had written us a note saying:

  Do help yourself to whatever you want. There is cold chicken in the fridge if you feel hungry.

  XXX H.

  However, we were both tired and neither of us wanted anything more to eat, so we showered and went to bed, too. We held each other very close for a while, but eventually Kate turned over one way and I turned over the other, and we fell asleep.

  I had a dream that I was walking over the surface of a frozen lake. It was almost dark and I knew that I had to reach the other side of the lake before night fell. On my left I could see a dark pine forest, like the forests that lined the road to the airport in Sweden. Ahead of me, on the bank, there was a cluster of strange tents, of all different shapes and sizes, with a haze of smoke rising above them.

  As I crossed the lake, every step made a sharp crackling noise, and I was worried that the ice was going to collapse under my feet. I hurried faster and faster, and the crackling grew louder. I could feel the ice giving way underneath me, and I was sure that I was going to fall into the water and drown.

  I opened my eyes. I wasn’t crossing a frozen lake at all, but lying in bed, with Kate sleeping next to me. Yet the crackling was still going on, as loud as it had been in my dream. Not only that, the light between the drapes was flickering, as if the streetlamp outside the house was just about to sputter out.

  I climbed out of bed and went to the window. When I parted the drapes, I could see the Philipses’ bedroom windows, at right angles to ours. Orange flames were leaping and dancing in the left-hand window, and it looked as if their bedroom was ablaze.

  I shook Kate’s shoulder and shouted, “Kate! Wake up! There’s a fire!”

  Kate sat up immediately. “What? What did you say?”

  “There’s a fire in David and Helena’s bedroom!”

  I dragged the drapes right back, so that she could see it. But when I looked across again, I realized that the fire wasn’t inside the Philipses’ bedroom at all. It was simply being reflected in the window from outside. In fact, I could see David standing close to the window, staring out. Although it was difficult to make out David’s expression behind the flickering flames, I could see tears glistening on his cheeks, as if he were suffering excruciating physical pain.

  What was totally weird, though, was that there was no fire outside. It should have been right in the middle of the brick-paved patio, between the two stone cherubs, but there was nothing there at all.

  “Do you see that?” I asked Kate. “There’s a reflection of a fire in that window, right? But no fire.”

  Kate came up behind me. “That’s not a fire. It’s only the streetlight.”

  I looked again. I could hardly believe it, but she was right. There was a dancing orange reflection in the Philipses’ bedroom window, but it was nothing more than the light from a sodium lamp, on the other side of the street, shining through the branches of a leafless tree.

  Without a word, I picked up my pants from the chair where I had hung them, and pulled on my sweater. “Come on,” I said, and went along to the Philipses’ bedroom and knocked.

  There was no reply. I knocked again, and called out, “David! It’s Gideon! Is everything okay?”

  I was just about to let myself into their bedroom when the door opened. David was standing there in red paisley-patterned pajamas, blinking at me.

  “Yes?” he said. “Was there something you wanted?”

  “I saw you at the window,” I said. “It looked like there was a fire.”

  “A fire? Where? What do you mean, a fire? I’ve been asleep.” “I saw you. I saw a fire reflected in the window and you were looking at it, and you were crying. Well, you had tears in your eyes, anyhow.”

  “Really?” said David, “I have to admit that I’m mystified. Perhaps what you saw was some kind of optical illusion. You know, like a mirage. We used to see them all the time, when I was in the Sudan. You could see what looked like whole cities sometimes, out in the desert, but they simply weren’t there.”

  I didn’t know what else to say to him. I couldn’t really accuse him of being a liar, not in his own home. But I was convinced that I had seen a fire reflected in his window, and I was sure that he had been staring at it, and weeping.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m sorry if we woke you up.”

  “Oh, think nothing of it. I’m a very poor sleeper in any case. I usually wake up two or three times a night and have a little read, or have a crack at the Daily Telegraph crossword.”

  He closed the door. Kate said, “Let’s get back to bed. We have a really full day tomorrow.” At that moment, the clock in the living room chimed two. “Today, I mean,” she corrected herself.

  But I said, “Not just yet. I want to take a look outside, in the backyard. If that was an optical illusion, I want to see how it happened.”

  I went through to the kitchen and shot the bolts on the French windows. Outside, the night was windy but not too cold. The wind was making the trees thrash around, and it carried the sound of a distant train rattling on its way to one of the London termini, one of the loneliest sounds in the world.

  “You should put on your shoes,” Kate admonished me.

  “I’m only going to take a quick look around.”

  I circled around the backyard. I was trying to work out exactly where the fire must have been located for us to see it reflected in David’s bedroom window. I had been pretty much right the first time: it must have been burning right here, between these two stone cherubs.

  I hunkered down and pressed the flat of my hand against the bricks. They were quite cold, but when I examined them more closely, I saw that some of them were cracked, as if they had been subjected to a fierce heat, and that there was a dark elliptical shape in the middle of them, which could have been a scorch mark.

  “I believe that there was a fire here,” I told Kate. “The only thing is, it wasn’t tonight.”

  I stood up. “I definitely saw David crying, too, but David says that he wasn’t. He says he was in bed asleep. But suppose what I saw was something that actually took place some other night, instead of tonight?”

  We went back into the kitchen. “Is this the same kind of experience I had in Stockholm? You know, when I saw Jack abducting Felicia? Can I see things that have happened in the past, as if they’re happening all over again? Or things that are going to happen, but haven’t happened yet? Or even things that might happen, but never actually do?”

  Kate said, “Only you can answer that.”

  I shook my head and said, “Don’t ask me. I didn’t pass seventh-grade math, let alone advanced physics. But I’ve read about stuff like that. Some couple who lived near Gettysburg swore that on the last night in June, every year, they could hear horses and wagons and soldiers marching past their house, hundreds of them, heading for the battlefield.”

  “Gideon, you realize you’re talking about ghosts.”

  “No, I’m not. Not actual ghostie ghosts, in bedsheets. But it’s like time getting out of sequence. Like dropping a deck of cards and putting them back in all the wrong order. I’m sure that might be possible. Well—I’ve seen it for myself, so it must be possible.”

  We went back to bed. I was beginning to feel that I was close to understanding what was happening to me—why some events and conversations seemed so oblique and out of sequence. Kate had told me that I had a rare gift, and maybe this was it—an ability to glimpse both the past and the future as if they were happening now. Not just glimpse it, in fact, but live it, complete with sounds and smells and feelings.

  Kierkegaard said that life can only be understood backward, but has to be lived forward. Maybe I was the exception to that rule.
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  * * *

  The following day was sunny but much colder. Huge white cumulus clouds rolled across London like Elizabethan galleons in full sail. As she had promised, Kate took me to see Buckingham Palace and Trafalgar Square and the Houses of Parliament.

  We behaved like typical American tourists, but Kate wouldn’t let me take any photographs of her. “I don’t want to come across them in twenty years’ time and be reminded of how young I was, and how happy I was. Life is sad enough as it is, don’t you think? So why take pictures that are only going to make your future self cry?”

  “Kate—I want to remember this day, that’s all, and if it makes me cry, that’ll be my tough luck.”

  She kissed me. “You’ll remember it, I promise you.”

  We had lunch at Rules in Maiden Lane, the oldest restaurant in London, sitting on a red plush banquette, surrounded by gilt-framed oil paintings. We ate native oysters and roast pheasant, with golden syrup sponge to finish with, and felt like two characters out of a Dickens novel.

  Afterward, we took a walk in St. James’s Park. We stopped by the lake, where two park officials were feeding fish to a small but greedy cluster of pelicans. The wind rustled noisily in the horse-chestnut trees, almost drowning the noise of the traffic. I felt as if we had found ourselves in one of those strange 1960s art movies, like Blow-Up, in which everything that happens is totally mundane, but inexplicably threatening, too.

  Kate said, “What would you like to do tomorrow? We haven’t done any shopping yet. We could go to Harrods.”

  I was about to answer her when—with a prickling of recognition—I saw the same two men as we had seen yesterday in Kensington Gardens, walking along the opposite side of the lake with the boy between them. As before, one of the men wore dark glasses and a black cap, while the other wore a gray overcoat—although today he also wore a gray scarf, which covered the lower part of his face. The boy was dressed in the same duffel coat, with the hood raised.

  “Kate—look. Would you believe it? It’s those same two guys, with that boy.”

  Kate shaded her eyes and said, “You’re right, yes. That’s a coincidence.”

  Like yesterday, the boy seemed to be unsteady on his feet, and kept stumbling, and every now and then the men grasped his elbows to prevent him from falling to his knees.

  We watched them for a while, as they made their way along the path, and then I said, “Maybe I should call the police.”

  “Do you think so?” said Kate. She looked around. “Nobody else seems to be worried about them.”

  “Maybe they’re not. But look at the way that kid keeps staggering.”

  “He looks as if he could be disabled. You don’t want to embarrass him.”

  “I don’t know. It all looks pretty damn strange to me.”

  Whatever misgivings I had about the two men and the boy, there wasn’t very much I could do. Although there was a bridge across the lake, it was too far away, and even if I ran, they would have been long gone by the time I had crossed over to the other side. The boy may have been unsteady on his feet, but the three of them were walking deceptively quickly. Soon they were nearly opposite us, heading east toward the nearest road.

  It was then that the boy turned his head and looked at me directly, and called out. He was too far away for me to be able to hear what he said, but he sounded as if he were distressed.

  I said, “That’s it. I’m going to call the police.”

  But Kate took hold of my arm and said, “No, Gideon, don’t.”

  “You can see it for yourself,” I protested. “The kid’s in some kind of trouble.”

  “Gideon, leave it. It’s far too late for you to be able to help him now.”

  I stared at her. “What do you mean by that? How do you know?”

  “I just do. You were right, what you said last night. This is the same kind of thing that happened in Stockholm.”

  “You know that kid? You know who he is?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  I watched the two men and the boy as they walked to the main road, and crossed over, and were lost from sight among the traffic. They seemed to disappear in a matter of seconds.

  “Kate,” I said, “I can’t go on like this. Whatever’s happening, I need to know what it is.”

  “You said that you trusted me. Please, Gideon—don’t stop trusting me now.”

  “I want to. But give me a reason to trust you. Just one.”

  “I can’t. I shouldn’t have to. Trust is trust.”

  “Well . . . just tell me one thing. Is that kid in any danger? Have those guys been hurting him?”

  Kate looked at me but I couldn’t read her expression at all. It was like the statue of Peter Pan, elvish and secretive. Behind her, with a loud explosion of flapping wings, scores of waterbirds suddenly rose from the surface of the lake.

  “He’s not in any danger,” she said. “I can promise you that.”

  “But you can’t tell me who he is? And you can’t tell me how you know him, or where he and those two guys are going, and how they just happened to be in the same park as us two days running?”

  “No.”

  “No? Just like that—no?”

  She started to walk away, toward The Mall, and for one stomach-churning moment I was tempted to let her go. I felt angry and frustrated and hurt, and more than anything else I felt that she was lying to me. How could she expect me to trust her if she couldn’t trust me in return?

  I waited until she was almost a hundred yards away, and then I called out, “Kate!”

  She didn’t answer, didn’t turn around, but stopped, and waited for me.

  I caught up with her. She still didn’t look at me.

  “Kate—you can’t expect me to go along with this. Not anymore.”

  “I’m not forcing you, Gideon. If you really can’t bring yourself to trust me, then go back to New York, and forget that we ever met. I won’t pretend that everything isn’t going to fall apart, if you decide to do that. But it’s your decision entirely.”

  A fire truck went past, with its siren warbling, so I missed what she said next, but I caught the word “wasted.”

  “Wasted? What would be wasted?”

  She looked at me at last. “All the time we’ve spent together. All the visions you’ve seen. If I explained everything to you, before you came to understand it for yourself, then we might just as well not have bothered. It’s one of the rules.”

  “What are you talking about? What rules?”

  “The rules of life, Gideon. The rules of human existence, and what happens after it, when it’s over.”

  “I still don’t get it.”

  “Well—how about this for a rule? Unless you’re terminally sick, or you’ve decided to kill yourself, you never know in advance what day you’re going to die. But that day is determined at the very instant of your conception, and even if you could find out what it was, there would be nothing you could do to change it.”

  “So who makes these rules? Are we talking about God?”

  “We’re talking about who we are and what we are, that’s all. The limitations of being human.”

  “You’re twisting my brain into knots. I don’t follow any of this.”

  “Trust me. Please, Gideon. I know I’m probably asking too much of you, but I don’t know anybody else I can turn to.”

  I saw a flicker of lightning, over toward Hyde Park. This was followed a few seconds later by a threatening barrage of thunder. I looked around. I was still angry, still confused, but I didn’t want to let Kate go.

  “Come on,” I said. “It’s starting to rain.”

  We walked together back to The Mall. As we reached it, a contingent of Royal Horse Guards came trotting past, in their shiny silver helmets and breastplates and bright red tunics, with their spurs jingling. We stood and watched them, and Kate said, “There—you can’t say I haven’t shown you London.”

  “What do they say? If you’re tired of London, you’re tire
d of life.”

  A black taxi approached us, with its amber for hire light on. Kate raised her hand and gave a piercing whistle that any New York doorman would have been proud of.

  Nineteen

  That evening, the atmosphere at the Philipses’ apartment was even more unsettling than it had been the evening before. David joined us in the kitchen for a supper of thick lentil soup, but every few minutes the phone would ring in the library and he would get up to answer it. Each time, when he returned, he looked increasingly anxious.

  Helena kept glancing out into the backyard, and when Kate tried to talk to her, she hardly listened.

  “You two went on a Mediterranean cruise last winter, didn’t you?” Kate asked her.

  “What?”

  “I just wondered if you enjoyed it.”

  “Oh . . . yes. We didn’t care for the other passengers much . . . kept to ourselves. But the food was very good. And so much.”

  “What cities did you visit?”

  Helena frowned, as if she hadn’t understood the question at all. But then she said, “Oh! Gibraltar, Barcelona, Ajaccio. Yes, we did enjoy it. But I don’t think we’ll ever do it again.”

  David came out of the library and sat down at the table. He stirred his soup for a moment, and then he pushed his bowl away.

  “Is everything all right?” I asked him.

  “What? Yes, I suppose so. It’s life, that’s all. It’s just one damned thing after another.”

  “Maybe I can help.”

  “Help?” he said, bitterly. “God knows how anyone can help.”

  * * *

  We started to make love when we went to bed that night, but I was very tired and Kate seemed to have her mind on other things, so after a few minutes I fell back onto my pillow and said, “Maybe in the morning.”

  “Okay,” she said, kissing my shoulder. I still had the purple teeth marks where she had bitten me, and they were still sore.

  “When we go shopping tomorrow, I want to buy myself one of those Pringle sweaters that David wears. And one of those check shirts, and a pair of those sandy-colored corduroy pants.”

  “You want to look like a middle-aged middle-class Brit?”