Ghost Music

by Graham Masterton

  “Why not? I think he looks very superior.”

  “Poor David.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I think there’s something tragic about him, that’s all. Like a doomed king in a Shakespeare play. No matter what he does, he can’t change fate.”

  “There you go again, making out that we don’t have choices.”

  “We don’t. Like I told you, it’s the rules.”

  “You never saw that movie. What’s it called, The Butterfly Effect? The guy keeps trying to change the past, to make his life work out better, but whatever he does it always turns out worse.”

  She kissed me again. “Well, there you are, then. That proves it.”

  “That proves what, exactly?” I asked her, but she turned over and she wouldn’t answer me. “That proves what? I mean, what?”

  * * *

  I had the same dream that I was trying to cross a frozen lake, and the ice was crackling beneath my feet. This time, however, I felt a cold flood of panic. And I could hear thumping, too, like drums beating, and somebody shouting.

  I sat up abruptly. The crackling was still going on, and so was the thumping, and an orange light was jumping and dancing outside the window.

  “Kate!” I said. “Kate—it’s happening again!”

  I clambered across the bed and pulled back the drapes. This time, there was a fire outside, in between the stone cherubs. Again, it was reflected on the Philipses’ bedroom window, and again, David was standing close to the window, staring out. But he wasn’t just crying, he was shouting and beating on the glass with his fists.

  I looked back at the fire, and it was only then that I realized what it was. It was a woman, on her knees, with her arms upraised, and she was blazing fiercely. The flames were leaping up so high that at first I couldn’t see her face, but then a breeze must have blown across the yard because they dipped down a little, and I could see that it was Helena.

  Her hair was now charred, and crawling with orange sparks. Her face was blackened like a minstrel’s, and she was screaming.

  “Kate!” I shouted, and shook her shoulder, but she lolled from side to side and wouldn’t wake up.

  I didn’t hesitate. I dragged the comforter off the bed and pulled it after me along the corridor into the kitchen. I tried to unlock the French doors, but the key was jammed solid. Outside, I could see Helena still ablaze, waving her arms as if she were drowning, rather than burning.

  I gave the doors a kick, but they were bolted as well as locked, and they wouldn’t budge. Helena’s screaming was shriller than ever, and I knew I had only seconds to save her, if I could save her at all. There was a heavy black saucepan on the stove, and I picked it up, so that I could smash the windows and get out into the yard.

  Before I reached them, however, Helena let out a scream so high-pitched that it actually hurt my ears, and the windows shattered right in front of me. The glass showered onto the floor like a bucketful of crushed ice, and the next thing I knew I was crunching through it in my bare feet.

  Kate appeared in the kitchen doorway, blinking, her hair sticking up on end. “Gideon, what are you doing?”

  I ducked down, trying to maneuver my way through one of the empty window frames. But before I was even halfway through, I realized that the flames were dying down.

  I managed to climb through the window and tug the comforter after me, but when I stood up straight, I saw that the fire had burned itself out, and the yard was lit only by streetlamps.

  Not only was there no fire, there was no smoke, and no sign of Helena either. Between the two cherubs there was nothing but a darkened mark on the paving bricks, and I didn’t have to reach down to touch it to know that it was stone cold.

  I turned around. The Philipses’ bedroom drapes were closed, and there was no sign of David staring out. Behind me, Kate was unlocking the French doors, and opening them up.

  “Are you okay?” she asked me. “Your feet aren’t cut, are they?”

  My left foot was bloody, but when I lifted it up to take a look, I could see that the cuts were all superficial. “I’m fine. I just don’t know what happened. I saw Helena, right out here in the yard, and she was on fire. It looked like somebody had poured gas all over her and set her alight. You know, like those Buddhist monks.”

  Kate said, “Come on, Gideon. Come back inside.”

  I looked around. “I saw her burning, goddamn it. She was waving her arms around and she was screaming. But she’s not even here, is she?”

  Kate held her hand out to me. “Come on, Gideon. You need to come back to bed.”

  Reluctantly, I hobbled back into the kitchen, and Kate closed the doors.

  “No point in locking them, really,” she said. “But I’ll call a glazier first thing, and arrange to have them repaired.”

  I pulled out one of the kitchen chairs and sat down. My heart was still banging hard against my ribs. “This is it, Kate. I don’t care why I’m seeing things, or what you’re trying to show me. I can’t take any more of it. Tomorrow morning, I really am going home.”

  She went to the sink and came back with a damp kitchen towel. “Here, lift up your foot. Let’s clean up these cuts before you get tetanus or something.”

  “You’re not going to beg me to stay?”

  “No,” she said. “I think you’ve probably seen enough.”

  “Then you believe that I saw Helena?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, hallelujah. That’s the first straight answer you’ve given me. So how come I could see her when she wasn’t really there?”

  “Because you can, my darling. That’s why.”

  * * *

  We locked the kitchen door behind us, and then went back to our bedroom. I don’t know how David and Helena had managed to sleep through all of that noise, but we were both reluctant to wake them up.

  Kate found some Band-Aids in the bathroom cabinet and stuck them crisscross on the soles of my feet.

  “So I was right?” I asked her. “I can see things that have happened at different times? Like yesterday, or even tomorrow?”

  “In a way. Like I told you before, it’s a very rare gift, and only a very few special people have it. The people who do have it are very often musicians—or composers, like you.”

  “Oh, yes? And why is that?”

  “Because, my darling, everything that happens in this world has its own resonance, like a tuning fork that goes on singing long after you’ve struck it. Hardly anybody can pick up that resonance, but you can. I knew that, the moment I first saw you looking out of your apartment window.”

  “So—how did you know that, exactly?”

  “I just did, that’s all.”

  “And so you took me to Stockholm and you brought me here to London, so that I could see things happening that nobody else could?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But why? That’s what I really need to know.”

  Kate climbed into bed and pulled the comforter up to her chin. “It’s time you got some sleep, if you’re going to fly back to New York tomorrow.”

  “You’re not coming with me?”

  She shook her head. “There’s someplace else I have to go first—somebody I have to see. But I’ll be back in the city by the weekend.”

  I climbed into bed next to her. “Helena—she’s not really going to burn, is she?”

  “Gideon—don’t worry about it. Nobody’s going to hurt her.”

  “The way she was screaming—I can still hear it now. I was going to break the windows with a cooking pot, but her screaming broke them first. It was like what happens when you scream.”

  She kissed my cheek, and then my eyelids. “If that’s the way you remember it. But get some sleep, okay?”

  * * *

  By the time I had showered and dressed the next morning, David had already left, so I didn’t have the chance to say good-bye to him. But Helena was still there, taking coffee in the living room with Kate. She was wearing a
cream silk blouse and she looked unusually pale, almost faded, like a black-and-white photograph of herself.

  “Kate told me about the French windows,” she said, as I came in. “You’re not to worry . . . it could have happened to anyone.”

  “Oh, yes?”

  Kate said, “I found an emergency glazier in the yellow pages. He’s coming around after lunch.”

  “That’s good. You’ll have to let me know how much it costs.”

  “Oh . . . don’t even think about it,” said Helena. “It was an accident, that’s all. Would you like some coffee? I’ll go and get another cup.”

  She went into the kitchen. I sat down next to Kate and said, “What did you tell them?”

  “I told them that you woke up in the middle of the night and felt like a breath of fresh air. You went out into the backyard but you accidentally left the French windows open. A gust of wind caught them and they slammed shut and broke.”

  “And they believed you?”

  “There was no reason for them not to.”

  “And Helena really had no idea that she did it herself, by screaming so loud?”

  “She wasn’t there, remember? So of course she had no idea.”

  I was about to protest that I had seen her there, whether she was there or not, but I didn’t really want to get into another argument about what Kate was hiding from me and what she wasn’t, especially at that time of the morning. At that moment, anyhow, Helena came back into the living room.

  “Would you like a biscuit, Gideon? Or one of these scones?”

  * * *

  I left for Heathrow airport around eleven thirty. I gave Kate one last embrace on the front doorstep. My taxi was already waiting for me by the curb, and because it was London, it was raining.

  “I’ll meet you back at St. Luke’s Place, then?” I asked her.

  “Of course you will.”

  “I don’t know. I have this very bad feeling that I’m never going to see you again.”

  “You will—I promise you. This is only the beginning.”

  “I love you,” I told her. “Visions or no visions. Rules or no rules. And there’s something I want to ask you.”

  “I know,” said Kate. She touched my lips with her fingertips, as if to stop me from saying any more. “But give me a little more time.”

  “I’m that transparent?”

  “I can see it in your face, my darling. I can feel it in your resonance.”

  The taxi driver tooted his horn and pointed at his watch. “Cutting it a bit fine, mate!”

  I kissed Kate again, and then I went down the steps and across the sidewalk. As I opened the taxi door, I turned around to wave to her. She was already closing the front door—but in the living room window, staring at me, I saw Malkin, or the white cat that looked like Malkin.

  I hesitated. I almost felt like going back. But then I thought, let’s leave this mystery to unravel itself in its own time, and I climbed into the taxi and closed the door.

  * * *

  When I arrived back at St. Luke’s Place, just after seven that evening, there were more than a dozen letters in my mailbox, mostly bills, and as many messages on my phone, including an invitation from my mother to come up to Connecticut for lunch last Sunday. She had obviously forgotten that I was in Europe, which didn’t surprise me at all. When I was a kid, she regularly forgot to pick me up from school, and she never remembered my birthday.

  It was a still, foggy night and my apartment was as chilly as a meat locker, so I kept my coat and my scarf on and turned up the heating. Victor must have been at home, because through the floorboards I could faintly hear Tony Bennett singing “The Boulevard of Broken Dreams.”

  I called Margot and told her that I was home.

  “I’m so relieved,” she said. “I had such a bad nightmare about you last night.”

  “I’ve told you before about eating pizza just before you go to bed,” I told her, but even as I said it, I thought about Helena blazing and screaming in her backyard, and Elsa standing in the moonlight, glistening wet, and those nightmares had been real, as far as I was concerned.

  “You were dead,” said Margot. “I went into this cellar and you were sitting on a chair, and your face was white. In fact it was so white it was almost blue.”

  “Margot, I’m alive, and I’m fine, and if you want to take a look for yourself, I’ll take you to The Pinch tomorrow for a drink.”

  “Okay. I have to give a piano lesson at two o’clock, but after that. Did you have a good time in London?”

  “I did and I didn’t. I’ll tell you all about it if you come over later.”

  “Who are those people with you?”

  “Nobody. Only Tony Bennett, God help me.”

  “No . . . I can hear that crackling noise and somebody whispering. Is it Kate?”

  “Margot,” I told her, “there’s nobody here but me.”

  “Maybe it’s your cell. It’s exactly like that whispering I heard when you called me from London.”

  “I’m not using my cell. This is my regular phone.” “Listen, Lalo, I’m not being nosy. If you have somebody there and you don’t want to tell me about it, that’s perfectly okay with me. It’s not that young guy you met at the Dance Theater Workshop, is it?”

  “Margot—”

  “Okay, okay. Don’t get your panties in a twist.”

  * * *

  By the time I had finished unpacking my case and throwing my shirts and shorts into the washing machine, my apartment was a whole lot warmer, and I could take off my coat and my scarf. I popped open a can of Dr Pepper, kicked off my Timberland loafers and sprawled out on one of the couches. The strange thing was that I didn’t feel as if I had been away at all. If it hadn’t been for the Wasa Museum guidebook on the table, and the postcards of Peter Pan’s statue in Kensington Gardens, I could easily have been convinced that the past few days had been nothing but a series of disconnected dreams.

  It was still only five PM out on the coast, so I called up Dick Bortolotti at the DDB Agency and Jeanette Hirsch at Thunder Music and my old friend Randy Spelman, who was helping me to arrange the theme music for a new NBC comedy series called Jack the Snipper, set in a small-town barbershop someplace in the Midwest.

  I was still talking to my L.A. agent Hazel McCall when I heard bumping and shouting below me in Victor’s apartment. The Tony Bennett music abruptly stopped, and then there was a crash that sounded like a side table tipping over, maybe with a lamp on it.

  “Sorry about this, Hazel,” I told her. “I’m going to have to call you back. It sounds like my neighbor is starting World War Three.”

  There was more shouting, and then I heard a woman screaming. I sat up straight. She screamed again, and then again, and this time I was sure of it. It was Kate.

  I couldn’t think how she had managed to get back to New York so quickly, but that wasn’t really what worried me. It sounded like Victor was yelling at her and hitting her and throwing things at her, and she was trying to get away from him.

  I pulled open my apartment door and hurried downstairs. Kate had stopped screaming but I could still hear Victor shouting. I thumped on his door and called out, “Victor! Victor, it’s Gideon, from upstairs! What the hell is going on, man?”

  Inside the Solway apartment everything went quiet. I waited for a few seconds, and then I knocked again.

  Victor opened the door. He had a cell phone in one hand and a glass of whiskey in the other. He was obviously still talking to somebody, because he said, “Hold up a moment, Ken.” Then he smiled at me and said, “Gideon! Back from your travels? What seems to be the problem?”

  I tried to look past him into his apartment. “I heard screaming. It sounded like you two were having a fight.”

  “You heard screaming?”

  “That’s right. Screaming. And yelling. And furniture falling over.”

  Victor opened the door wider, so that I could see into the living room. None of the chairs or tables had been d
isturbed. The redhaired woman was sitting on one of the couches, wearing a blue satin robe. She was watching some TV show about movie stars’ homes. When she saw me, she gave me a little finger-wave and called out, “Hi, there!”

  “Maybe what you heard was the people next door,” Victor suggested.

  “Well, yes, maybe. But it really sounded like it was coming from down here.”

  “These old buildings . . . it’s the cavity walls, and the air vents. Funny how sound can carry.”

  “I guess,” I conceded. “Sorry I bothered you.”

  “That’s okay, Gideon. Glad to know you’re so concerned. If you ever hear us fighting for real, make sure you come down quick, before Monica murders me.”

  He gave me a toothy laugh and closed the door.

  I went slowly back upstairs. I was convinced that I had heard Kate screaming, yet Victor must have been right. All that commotion must have come from the couple next door, although I had never heard them before. Apart from that, Kate had still been in London at eleven this morning, and when I left her, she hadn’t even started to pack.

  When I reached the landing, I found Malkin waiting for me. She was sitting beside my front door, her paws neatly tucked together, and she was purring loudly.

  “Okay, puss,” I told her. “Why don’t you come inside for a can of anchovies, and tell me what in God’s name is going on around here?”

  Twenty

  Margot came around the following day and I took her to The Pinch on Sullivan Street for Guinness and shepherd’s pie. The Pinch is a scruffy Irish-style pub: two narrow red-brick rooms, with a huge flat-screen TV and a well-worn dartboard. But the atmosphere is always cheery and boisterous, and that was just what I needed after my trip to Europe.

  “Lalo—you’ve changed so much since you and Kate have been together,” said Margot. “You’re worried about something, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, frankly. But I don’t know what it is.”

  “I don’t understand. How can you be worried about something and not know what it is?”

  As soberly and as factually as I could, I told her about my experiences at the Westerlunds’ apartment in Stockholm and the Philipses’ apartment in London. I told her about Elsa and Felicia being in two places at once and Helena Philips burning, and about Malkin, too. I wasn’t sure why, but I was beginning to think that in some way, Malkin held some kind of key to all of this, like the missing piece of sky in a jigsaw.