Ghost Music

by Graham Masterton

  I punched Jack in the stomach, just below the sternum, as hard as I could. If anybody had punched me like that, I would have gone down like a knackered horse. But Jack’s abdomen felt like a sack of cement, and he didn’t even flinch.

  Jack hit me back, on my collarbone. I bent forward, winded, and he hit me again, right on the cheek. I thought I heard Kate cry out, “Gideon!” but then Jack hit me in the mouth, and I toppled backward and struck my head against the wall. For a count of five, everything went black-and-white, like a photographic negative.

  When I managed to pull myself up again, I saw Jack heaving Victor up the cellar steps, with one of Victor’s arms around his shoulders. They climbed upward as if they were drunk, missing every second or third step and clinging to the handrail to stop themselves falling back down.

  Nobody from any of the families tried to stop them, but all of them slowly walked after them, toward the bottom of the steps, where they gathered in a semicircle, still singing. Victor dropped onto his knees, sobbing, but Jack managed to pull him up again.

  Kate came up to me and gently touched my cheek with her fingertips. “Gideon—are you all right?”

  “Don’t know. My head’s ringing like a goddamned bell.”

  “Hey—you’re my hero. But you didn’t have to fight him. He’s not going to get away, my darling, I promise you. And neither will Victor.”

  I shook my head, trying to clear it, but with all that singing going on, I couldn’t think straight. Victor and Jack had pushed open the door at the top of the steps and crashed through it.

  “It sure looks like they’re getting away.”

  “No, they won’t,” said Kate, and firmly took hold of my hand. “This is where Victor and Jack get what they deserve. You’ll have your evidence against them. They’ll both get life sentences, if they’re lucky.”

  Together, we climbed up the cellar steps. When we reached the hallway, I saw that Jack and Victor had left the front door wide-open. An icy wind was blowing, and snow was whirling into the living room.

  “There—they’ve escaped, goddamn it.”

  “Have a little faith,” said Kate. She hurried toward the open door and I followed her, cupping my hand over my swollen mouth to shield it from the wind.

  Red taillights flared, and I heard the whoomph of the Explorer’s engine starting up. Jack was driving. Victor was lolling in the passenger seat, his face against the window. I thought at first that he was staring at me but then I realized that he was blindly staring at nothing at all.

  The Explorer backed up, and then turned, heading for the highway.

  “All right, I have faith,” I said. “But how are we going to stop them now?”

  But Kate laid one hand on my shoulder and said, “Look.”

  I blinked through the thickly billowing snow. As the Explorer sped toward the entrance gates, a host of figures appeared in its headlights, blocking its way. More than fifty of them now, maybe seventy or eighty, and more of them approaching out of the gloom. Above the bellowing of the Explorer’s engine, that high, eerie screaming was even more penetrating than ever.

  The Explorer skidded to a halt, with its exhaust fuming red. The figures started slowly to encircle it. The Westerlunds and the Philipses and the Cesarettis, in different moments from their lives—when they were happy, when they were suffering, when they were close to death. I thought: why doesn’t Jack simply run them down? But then I saw him twisting around in the driver’s seat, trying to back up, and I realized that he was terrified of them. If he tried to run them down, he would have to admit to himself that they were here, that they were real, and that they wanted revenge for what he and Victor had done to them. Either that, or he knew that they were dead already, and he couldn’t kill them a second time.

  The Explorer’s tires slithered and whinnied but the driveway was too icy, and he succeeded only in sliding diagonally toward the ditch.

  He slammed the Explorer into drive, and then reverse, and then drive, and then reverse, and at last the SUV began to creep backward. He had only traveled a few yards, however, when I heard a sharp, crackling noise, and saw a shower of yellow sparks. A power line crossed over the driveway, and its glass insulators had shattered, so that the cable had dropped down onto the snow. It was spitting and writhing like an angry anaconda.

  The Explorer’s rear wheels ran right over the power line, but as it passed under the front wheels, it became entangled with the drive shaft. There was a loud thump, and the Explorer was brought to a halt, with sparks gushing out from under its wheel arches.

  The ghostly figures remained where they were, but now I realized that they had stopped screaming. All I could hear now was the venomous fizzing of the power line, and the revving of the Explorer’s engine, as Jack tried desperately to drag it free.

  Kate gripped my hand. Her own fingers were very cold. “They can’t escape, Gideon, whatever they do.”

  I glanced at her. For some reason, the movement of her lips didn’t quite match what she was saying, as if her words had been dubbed. I felt as if she were two or three seconds ahead of me or maybe two or three seconds behind.

  The Explorer’s engine screamed again, but the power line was far too securely wound around the drive shaft, and Jack was only pulling it tighter.

  Nearly a minute passed, with the Explorer just ticking over. By the light that was coming from the open door of the house behind me, I could see Victor and Jack, sitting side by side behind the snow-blurred windshield like two accused men sitting in the dock. In a way, this garden was now a courtroom, where they were being judged for the crimes that they had committed.

  Off to my right, about fifty yards away, I saw two figures struggling. I shielded my eyes with my hand, and realized that they were Jack and Felicia, and that Jack was dragging Felicia away, just as I had seen him dragging her away at the Wasa Museum in Stockholm. Both figures moved in a jerky, fitful fashion, as if they were characters in a home movie, or a flicker book. But I clearly recognized both of them. Jack was wearing his black coat and Felicia was wearing her yellow windbreaker.

  I looked back at the Explorer. The real Jack was still sitting behind the wheel, but I could see that he was staring at the image of himself that was pulling Felicia through the snow. He looked ghastly. His face was enamel white, like a Venetian plague doctor’s mask.

  Felicia let out a blurry scream, and the image of Jack twisted her around and threw her face-first onto the ground. He knelt on her back, pinning her down, and then he grasped her neck with both hands and started to throttle her.

  I shouted, “Hey!” and made a move toward them, but Kate quickly snatched at my sleeve.

  “Just watch,” she said. “Now that you’re here, they can show you their stories. But they’re only stories. There’s nothing you can do to change them.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a light dancing, and when I turned around, there was Helena Philips, blazing from the waist upward. She was howling rather than screaming, while a tall flame flapped from the top of her head, and her ears shriveled up. Another image of Jack was standing close beside her, with his hand raised to protect his face from the heat.

  All around us, the ghosts of the Westerlunds and the Cesarettis and the Philipses were playing out their different scenarios of pain and desperation. The snow-filled garden had become a theater of agonizing memories. There was Jack, again and again, strangling and mutilating and burning. There was Victor, too, pacing impatiently and vengefully around every act of torture, almost as if he were angry that he couldn’t make his victims suffer more.

  Off to my left, I saw David Philips with his hands clasped over his eyes, and Amalea, sewn to her mattress, circling through the snow as if she were actually floating on the Grand Canal. I saw Elsa, drowned; and eerily, high in the air, hanging from nothing at all, I saw Enrico and Salvina, slowly rotating from a chandelier that wasn’t there. Below them, though, stood Jack, with a coiled rope over his shoulder, his head raised, and a smile on his face
that was almost beatific; and not far away, Victor, although Victor wasn’t looking up at them. Victor was looking at something else that wasn’t there: one of the Cesarettis’ antique vases, perhaps, or the view out onto the Campo San Polo. He had the creepiest look of satisfaction on his face.

  The ghosts weren’t screaming any longer, but the garden was filled with intermittent cries and shouts and sobbing, and the awful shuffling of people fighting for their lives.

  I put my arm around Kate and watched all these scenes with a growing feeling of helplessness and rage. There was nothing I could do to save these families now. Their fathers had damned them all, and Victor Solway had made sure they had all gone to hell. But I was sure of one thing: I was going to see Victor and Jack convicted for what they had done, and pay the price for it.

  After a few minutes, one after another, the jerky images faded. The last thing I saw was the yellow of Felicia’s windbreaker, like a sunflower seen through a misted-up window. Eventually, only the figures remained, wordless and watchful.

  There was a long, long pause, while the Explorer’s engine continued to turn over. Then I saw the driver’s door open. I thought: Jesus—he’s not going to try to climb out? If he does, he’d better jump way clear. Those feeder lines carry more than four thousand volts.

  It was then that I saw Jack’s arm waving, as if he were groping to find his way. The singing must have blinded him, too. That’s why the families had stopped. Now, patient and unmoving, they were waiting for him to bring himself his own retribution.

  “You scum!” he screamed. “Couldn’t even beat me face-to-face, could you? Didn’t have the balls! Didn’t have the fucking cojones!”

  Maybe he did it on purpose. You can never tell what a man like that might be thinking. Pain. Death. I’ve given them to plenty of other people, maybe it’s time I found out for myself what an agonizing death really feels like.

  He stepped down onto the driveway while he was still holding the door handle, and he exploded, blown into tattered black shreds. Electricity jumped and spat like firecrackers all around the outline of the Explorer, and for a split second the interior was all lit up. I saw Victor Solway, his blind eyes bulging, his lips stretched back as if he were laughing at some monstrous joke.

  Then, with a deafening bang, the Explorer’s fuel tank blew up. The vehicle was thrown into the air and crashed onto its side, where it lay furiously blazing.

  “Jesus,” I said. I felt utter shock. But the crowd of figures stood quite still and watched the inferno in silence, as if they were doing nothing more than burning last year’s leaves. One of the apparitions of Tilda Westerlund turned toward us—the one whose cheeks were bruised, and whose lips had been split apart.

  “What are they going to do now?” I asked Kate.

  “They’re leaving now. They came here to get justice, no more than that.”

  One by one, the assembled company turned away from us, into the falling snow, and as they turned away, they vanished, as if they had been images in mirrors, turned sideways. Within a few seconds, they were all gone.

  I turned to Kate and said, “Will they be at peace now? I know they don’t have proper resting places.”

  “At peace? I don’t think anybody who ever lived is ever at peace.”

  “First things first, though,” I told her. “Let’s go rescue Margot.”

  * * *

  It was dark in the house, because the power was out, but we went through to the kitchen and found half a dozen large white candles in a drawer. We lit one each and went back down to the cellar. “Margot,” I said, as I came down the steps, “your knight in shining armor has arrived.”

  “What was that terrible noise?”

  “Victor and Jack had a little car trouble. A power line came down, got itself wrapped around their wheels.”

  I tugged off her blindfold and loosened the cords around her wrists.

  “Oh God, Lalo,” she said. “I thought they were going to kill me.”

  “You don’t have to worry about them now. They were both electrocuted. They’re dead. Both of them.”

  “You’re not serious. Dead?”

  I knelt down to untie Margot’s ankles. Kate said, “It was no more than they deserved, believe me.”

  “Are you okay, Margot?” I asked her.

  “Stiff. Sore. Dying to go to the bathroom. But thank you for saving me. Thank you so, so much! You’re a superhero.”

  I stood up, and turned to Kate. “I guess I’d better call the police. And the fire department. And the power company, too.”

  Kate said, “Not yet. There’s something else I want you to do first. I want you to find the proof that Victor and Jack were murderers. I want to show them for what they were. Think of all the relatives and friends who never found out what happened to the families they killed. There should be a pick in the garden shed.”

  “You want me to do it? We’re talking about your parents here.”

  She nodded. “They disappeared, and everybody presumed they were dead, but nobody ever knew where they went. Now we know.”

  I hunkered down again. Now that I knew what I was looking for, I could see that there was a rough rectangle of different-colored cement in the center of the floor.

  I didn’t have to ask Kate if she was sure that she really wanted me to do this. If the remains of my parents had been lying under this floor, I would have wanted to dig them up, too, and give them the kind of funeral they deserved.

  * * *

  I found a rusty pick in the garden shed, and carried it back into the house. I tied my handkerchief around my nose and mouth and attacked the cellar floor with it.

  Lucky for me, the cement had been mixed very dry, and most of it broke up into crumbly lumps. All the same, it took me over four hours of hacking at it before I eventually struck the top of a large wooden box, and I was sweaty and gritty and exhausted.

  I wearily trudged up the cellar steps and found Kate and Margot in the living room. Margot was asleep on one of the couches, covered in an overcoat, while Kate was standing by the window, watching the sky gradually grow lighter. The gardens were still covered in snow, but it was going to be a sharp, sunny day.

  I came up to her and put my arms around her. “I think I’ve found them,” I said. “There’s a big wooden box under the floor, but I haven’t opened it up yet.”

  She nodded. “At least they can have a decent burial. Not like all of those other poor people.”

  The sun was shining through one of the beech hedges along the driveway, so that it looked as if it were on fire.

  “We made it, anyhow,” said Kate. She looked at her watch. “Look—eight o’ clock. Less than an hour to spare.”

  “Less than an hour to spare before what?”

  She turned around and kissed me. “You won’t be sad, will you?”

  “Sad? Why should I be sad?”

  “The air tickets . . . Pearl bought them for me. And the keys . . . she took them out of Victor’s desk. She used to invite herself into his apartment for a drink, and borrowed them when he wasn’t looking.”

  “Wily old bird, that Pearl, isn’t she?”

  Kate smiled. “There were certain things I couldn’t do. I didn’t have a credit card anymore. And I couldn’t take anything from Victor’s apartment.”

  “Well, I thought you lived there, but when I took a look around, it was pretty obvious that you didn’t.”

  “I haven’t lived there in three years, Gideon. Three years exactly, to the day.”

  “But you told me you couldn’t leave.”

  “It wasn’t the apartment I couldn’t leave. It was Victor. You can be tied to somebody by hatred, just as much as you can be tied to them by love. I was determined that he wasn’t going to get away with what he’d done to Michael, or the child who was murdered for Michael’s new heart. Or what he’d done to my parents. Or to me.”

  Kate looked at me with those rainy gray eyes, and suddenly they were shining with tears. “We all have three
years to make amends. Three turnings of the seasons to make things right. Don’t ask me why.”

  “Amends? Amends for what?”

  “Anything you like. Some people don’t bother to make amends at all. Some people only do very small things, like help their loved ones to find a lost piece of jewelry or a photograph or a diary. Some people simply make their presence felt, so that they can bring comfort to those they’ve left behind.

  “But I wanted to make sure that Victor was punished. That was the hold he had over me. I couldn’t accuse him myself, as you know. I couldn’t find any evidence, and I couldn’t find anybody to help me. Not until I saw you looking out of your window, and realized that you could see me.”

  “Of course I could see you,” I told her. “I can still see you. I can feel you, too, goddammit. You’re real. Other people can see you, too.”

  “When I’m with you, yes—because you have the gift. But otherwise, no. And you know it, don’t you? You’ve known it for a long time.”

  “Yes,” I admitted. “I didn’t want to believe it. But, yes. But if I can see you and feel you and talk to you, what difference does it make?”

  “Gideon, I’m the same as them. I’m the same as the Westerlunds and the Philipses and the Cesarettis.”

  “But we’re lovers, Kate. How can we be lovers, if you don’t exist? How can we possibly be lovers if you’re—?” I couldn’t bring myself to say the word “dead” without tipping myself right over the edge of human reason.

  Kate led me over to the window seat. I sat down and grasped both of her hands so that I could feel how real her fingers were, and so that she couldn’t pull away from me. If I let her walk out that door, who knows if I would ever see her again?

  “Gideon—I can’t stay here any longer. No matter how much I want to.”

  “Who says? God?”

  Outside, the whole garden sparkled. “You still have your gift, Gideon. You can help scores of other people, too. So many murders go unpunished. You can help the victims to get justice—just like you did for the Westerlunds and the Cesarettis and the Philipses—and the Kilners, too.”