“The Kilners?”
“My parents. Henry and Joyce Kilner. Victor killed them because they refused to pay for a second heart transplant for poor little Michael. And he killed me, too, because I persuaded them not to. I couldn’t get any answer from them, on the phone, so I came up here looking for them. Jack Friendly was waiting for me, with a hammer.”
“All right,” I said. I was trembling with stress, and with exhaustion. “Supposing I accept that you’re some kind of spirit? Is that what you are, some kind of spirit? You say that you were given three years to put things right, which is what you’ve managed to do. But what happens after that? Who’s to say you can’t stay around?”
“Gideon, I died!”
“I don’t care! So long as I can see you and feel you, so long as we can go on being lovers, what difference does it make? I have a gift, and I can use it to help other people. But who says I can’t use it to get what I want, too? And what I want, Kate, is you!”
She looked at me for a very long time without saying anything. Then she turned and looked out at the snow. The Explorer had burned out now, until it was nothing more than a blackened skeleton, although brown smoke was still drifting across the driveway.
“I don’t know, darling,” she said. “I just don’t know what happens now. I’m no more of an expert on the world beyond than you are.”
“Then stay,” I told her.
The sunshine in the garden was dazzling now. I kissed Kate’s hair and I kept my arms tightly around her waist, so that I could feel her breathing. As long as I kept her close like this, there was no way that she could leave me.
* * *
I don’t know how long it took me to fall asleep. They say that the average when you’re really tired is seven minutes. But I slept, and I dreamed that Kate and I were walking through the gardens of Drottningholm, in Sweden, and that the air was filled with shining snow, like thistledown.
Somebody was shaking my arm. At first I thought it was one of the palace guides, trying to tell me that we were walking the wrong way, but then I opened my eyes and it was Margot.
“Margot? What’s wrong?”
“You were talking in your sleep. I just wanted to make sure that you were okay.”
I blinked, and looked around the living room. “I’m fine. Jesus, it’s cold in here. Where’s Kate?”
“Kate? I haven’t seen Kate.”
I sat up. “What do you mean? She was here only a couple of minutes ago. She was sitting right here.”
Margot said, “If she was, she’s not here now. I didn’t see her.”
I stood up and went to the front door and opened it. The garden was deserted, and there were no footprints in the freshly fallen snow.
“She’s gone,” I said.
“Maybe she went to get some supplies,” Margot suggested.
“Maybe.”
I went back into the house and closed the door.
* * *
It took me another forty minutes to clear the cement from the lid of the wooden box. When I managed to lever it open, there was a soft exhalation of gases, like somebody with very bad morning breath. Inside, closely packed together, there were human thigh bones and arm bones and ribs and pelvises, as well as mummified flesh the color of smoked bacon rind.
So this is what Victor and Jack had done with Kate’s parents. Terrorized them, tortured them, and forced them to sign over their house. Then he had killed them, and cemented them under their own cellar floor.
There were two skulls, one at each end of the box, and both of them still had skin and hair on them, although their eyes had been reduced to the size and color of pickled walnuts. They were both grinning at me, as if they were pleased to see me.
I didn’t want to disturb the remains, because the state police would want to see them exactly as I had found them. But as I lifted away the lid, one of the skulls rolled sideways, and I realized that there was a third skull underneath it. A skull with straight, ash blonde hair, still clogged at the back with black dried blood.
“Kate,” I said. My voice sounded like somebody else altogether.
* * *
We got back to the city around 5:00 PM, in the middle of rush hour. I dropped Margot home, and then I took Henry’s Malibu back. He was deeply relieved to see that it was undented, although he had been forced to take the commuter train back to New Rochelle.
“You look like shit,” he told me. “Also, I hate to tell you this, but you smell like shit, too. Don’t you musicians use a deodorant?”
“I just exhumed three bodies,” I told him.
“Sure you did. You owe me a steak dinner at Angelo & Maxie’s.”
* * *
I paid a visit to Pearl, upstairs. She was sitting in her pink bathrobe playing solitaire.
“How did it go?” she asked me. Cigarette smoke trailed across the room, and shuddered when it reached the open window, like a ghost.
“Good. I guess things worked out the way they were supposed to.”
Pearl nodded toward the painting on the easel. “I thought they had.”
I walked around and took a look. The painting was finished, but the only person in it was Pearl. Everybody else had gone, as they had in the snow. Turned around, like mirrors turned sideways, and vanished.
“Where do you think people go, when they die?” I asked her. “I mean, what do you think it’s like?”
Pearl took a long drag at her cigarette, with one eye closed against the smoke. “It’s just like being in the movies, that’s what they tell me, except that you’re in the movie instead of the audience. Don’t you worry, you’ll find out for yourself one day. We all do.”
She paused, and then she said, “You miss her, don’t you?”
I nodded. I suddenly found myself very close to tears.
Pearl said, “Very strange thing, love. When you don’t have it, it hurts. And when you do, it hurts like hell.”
I went back downstairs. Sitting outside my door, waiting patiently, was Malkin. She mewed when she saw me, and she followed me inside.
“You hungry?” I asked her, as she wound herself persuasively around my ankles. “Of course you’re hungry. Stupid question.”
But it’s so goddamned difficult to open a can of anchovies when you’re crying.
Twenty-nine
Late the following afternoon, as it was beginning to grow dark outside, I sat down at my keyboard and I started to compose Spirit Song.
Spirit Song is so familiar now, and so well-known, that I sometimes find it difficult to believe that there was a time when it didn’t exist. But as I was scoring it, there was no doubt in my mind that it was one of the best melodies that I had ever written, or might ever write. It was all of my love for Kate, and everything that she had showed me about the real world and the world beyond, in music.
By 9:00 PM that evening, I had almost finished it. I played it over, very slowly, while Malkin sat on one of the couches, watching me with slitted eyes.
“What do you think, puss?” I asked her.
“I think it’s beautiful,” replied a very quiet voice, close behind me.
Before I could turn around, two cool hands covered my eyes.
“Guess who?” she said.
About the Author
GRAHAM MASTERTON is the author of more than 75 horror novels, historical sagas and thrillers. His first horror novel, The Manitou, was published in 1976 and filmed with Tony Curtis, Susan Strasberg, Burgess Meredith and Stella Stevens. Other notable horror novels have included Charnel House (awarded a Special Edgar by Mystery Writers of America); Tengu (awarded a Silver Medal by the West Coast Review of Books); Picture of Evil (only non-French winner of the Prix Julia Verlanger); The Chosen Child (named Very Best Horror Novel of the Year by Science Fiction Chronicle); and Trauma, (nominated as Best Original Paperback by Mystery Writers of America.) Masterton’s short stories have been collected into five volumes, including Grease Monkey, a limited edition of his iconoclastic stories of erotic horror
. Three of them were featured in Tony Scott’s TV series The Hunger. He was the editor of Scare Care, a horror anthology published for the benefit of abused children in the USA and Europe. The Manitou was the first Western horror novel to be published in Poland after the collapse of Communism, thanks to his Polish wife Wiescka, and he regularly tops the Polish bestseller lists. Wiescka died in April, 2011, and this book is dedicated to her memory.
Graham Masterton’s official website is www.grahammasterton.co.uk, and it includes a full bibliography, message board and upto-date news.
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