Spirit

by Graham Masterton

  Laura stirred, and clutched at her pillow. Aunt Beverley watched her for almost ten minutes, but as the room darkened before the dawn, she turned and went back to her own bed, where she lay sleepless for over two hours, occasionally smoking, thinking about bad times and happy times, and whether she was right to take Laura down to Fox tomorrow.

  She didn’t look out of the window, or she would have seen the way in which the bougainvillea threw its shadow on the whitewashed wall; and the way the oil-lamp smudges seemed to stare towards her bedroom like brooding eyes.

  She would have seen what looked like a rat, at first, or a small raccoon, lying dead among the jasmine. The Mexican cleaning woman would pick it up tomorrow morning, before Aunt Beverley woke up, and she would throw it in the trash. After all, what did anybody in Hollywood need with a small-sized, dried-up, fox-fur glove?

  Aunt Beverley drove Laura to Fox herself; in the powder-blue Chevrolet Styleline she was borrowing on a ‘semi-permanent’ basis from Max Arnow, the casting director at Columbia. Only God and Max Arnow knew what favours Aunt Beverley had provided in return. Laura had woken up tired, with swollen eyes, and so Aunt Beverley had splashed her eyes with ice-water, and made her lie in her room with cucumber slices all over her face. The puffiness had gone down, but she still looked distracted. Aunt Beverley was smoking like a fast-running locomotive, and kept flicking her ash out of the window.

  ‘Remember to be natural, be yourself,’ she repeated.

  ‘For goodness’ sake, Aunt Beverley, I will be natural.’

  ‘Give him a private moment. Do you know what a private moment is? A private moment is when you act out something that you would only do on your own, with nobody watching. Shelley Winters once told me about this private moment that Jerry O’Loughlin acted out, at the Actors Studio. A young man comes into his apartment, right? It’s snowing outside, it’s cold. He’s wearing a hat and an overcoat and a scarf. He’s carrying a box of fried chicken. He takes off his gloves and he puts the chicken on a high stool. Then he just stands there in his hat and his overcoat and his galoshes and he eats the chicken. He’s eating because he must, with no enjoyment, without undressing, without sitting down. Shelley said that it was so sad, so lonesome, so pointless, she was crying like a baby.’

  ‘I never ate fried chicken standing up,’ said Laura.

  ‘But you must have done something in private.’

  ‘I read in private. I fix my make-up in private. What else? I take showers in private.’

  Aunt Beverley gave a grim, J. Edgar Hoover smile. ‘I’m quite sure that Chester would sign you up for ever if you decided to do that for your private moment.’

  Laura leaned against the Chevrolet’s door, and tipped her sunglasses down to the end of her nose, and scrutinized Aunt Beverley with a mixture of affection and cockiness. ‘You’re not selling me to Chester, are you?’

  ‘You’re going for a camera test, that’s all.’

  ‘I don’t know. Do you think I should trust you?’ They often teased each other this way.

  ‘Do you think you should you trust anybody?’ Aunt Beverley retorted. ‘Some of the people I trusted the most were the people who betrayed me the worst. You remember Moe? The man who was with me when we first collected you from Sherman? Moe was such a sugarpie. He borrowed eight thousand dollars to put on the horses and lost it, all of it, and practically made me bankrupt. “Trust me,” he said. In an iguana’s ass.’

  They reached the gates of the Fox lot and Aunt Beverley showed her pass. She drove in and parked in the visitors’ parking-lot, behind the commissary. It was a cool, bright day, with the yuccas shaking in the breeze like castanets and the sun bouncing off the concrete sidewalks. A Roman slave walked past, wearing sandals and a red tunic, smoking a cigarette.

  ‘Don’t forget,’ Aunt Beverley promoted her. ‘Natural, and private.’

  ‘I won’t forget. Natural, and private.’

  ‘And sincere.’

  ‘For goodness’ sake, Aunt Beverley.’

  ‘And innocent. Chester really goes for innocence.’

  They had to wait for over an hour before Chester was free. Eventually he came out of his office in a yellow polo shirt and white ducks, with a towel slung over his neck. He kissed both of them.

  ‘Sorry you had to wait so long. Did they bring you coffee? Accountants! They want me to shoot the crash scenes on the lot, to save money. I said listen, why don’t we spend no money at all, and just have a loud bang offscreen, and a cloud of dust, and some kid to throw an old car tyre into shot. All right, it’ll cost a dollar seventy-five for the tyre and a quarter to the kid, if you can stretch to that.’

  He checked his watch. ‘Why don’t I take you across for your camera test right now? They’re all set up. Beverley, you don’t have to hang around here if you don’t want to . . . this is going to take at least an hour. Come back and join us for lunch, say, twelve-thirty?’

  Aunt Beverley gave him a hearty clap on the shoulder. ‘Okay, Chester. I have some shopping to do, anyway. I need a new terracotta planter.’ She said it in a long-drawn-out sarcastic tone, and looked directly at Laura as she did so. Chester said, ‘Some kind of private joke between you two?’

  Aunt Beverley left and Chester took Laura across to one of the smaller soundstages. ‘That aunt of yours, she’s a character, isn’t she?’ said Chester.

  ‘She’s quite eccentric,’ Laura admitted. ‘But she’s so understanding. She lets me do whatever I like, most of the time, but I always know that she cares.’

  ‘I’ll tell you a funny story about your Aunt Beverley,’ Chester enthused. He opened the door to the soundstage and winked at her. ‘One day, maybe, when you’re old enough.’

  ‘It’s not one of those stories?’

  ‘Unh-hunh,’ he told her, shaking his head. ‘It’s not like any story you ever heard. And everybody’s in it. It’s a Who’s-Who-of-Hollywood story. It’s even got Trigger in it.’

  ‘Roy Rogers’ Trigger?’

  Chester made a face which meant ‘you’d better believe it.’

  Inside the soundstage, the lights picked out the corner of an 18th-century garden, with a stone balustrade and an urn overflowing with roses. ‘This is the garden set for Lady of Versailles,’ said Chester. ‘We’re going to do your tests here. Look – this is Rosa, she’s going to take you into makeup. This is Bruce, the greatest lighting cameraman since God, and this is Terry, she’s going to give you some lines to read.’

  ‘Aunt Beverley said you wanted me to act out a private moment.’

  Chester looked nonplussed.

  ‘You know,’ said Laura. ‘Act out something which I usually do by myself, with nobody else watching.’

  Chester shook his head. ‘That’s Method. I’m not interested in Method. I want actors to act.’ He looked at her for a moment, his cheeks puffed out, and then he said, ‘Still . . . if you want to share a private moment a little later . . . ?’

  She was tested for over an hour – walking, smiling, turning her face this way and that way, looking up, looking down. She had to talk, and laugh, and pretend to weep. She had to scream. She had to show what Chester called ‘the whole ga-mutt’ of emotions.

  ‘What did you think?’ asked Laura, as they walked across to the commissary.

  ‘Bruce will bring me the rushes this afternoon. I thought you looked terrific, but it’s what the camera felt about you that counts. If the camera loves you, you’re made. If it doesn’t, well . . . you said you wanted to write.’

  He stopped, and took hold of her hand. ‘I’m going to tell you something, though, you’re one pretty girl, Laura. Your Aunt Beverley was right about you. You’re a doll.’

  ‘Is that what she called me?’ asked Laura.

  At the same time, however, she glimpsed a small white figure in a white dress crossing quickly between the commissary and the offices next to them. It was only for a second, the briefest of glimpses. She could have blinked and missed it. It could have been a child actress, walki
ng from one soundstage to another. It could have been anybody’s daughter, in a white summer dress. But Laura was almost certain that it was the Peggy-girl, watching her – keeping her distance, but watching her.

  ‘Something wrong?’ asked Chester.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Laura; but she continued to feel troubled all through lunch, and even Aunt Beverley noticed how often she turned to look out of the window.

  When they returned home that afternoon there was a wire waiting for them, telling them that Laura’s father was dead.

  Fifteen

  Two days before the funeral it snowed and went on snowing. The Litchfield hills became eerily silent, under a sky the colour of dark grey flannel. There was little that Elizabeth could do except spend her days indoors, tidying up her father’s books and papers.

  Her boss Margo Rossi had reluctantly given her two weeks’ compassionate leave, although she had insisted on sending up the manuscript of Reds Under The Bed so that Elizabeth could finish line-editing it. ‘I’m sorry about your father,’ she had told Elizabeth, over the phone. ‘But there’s nothing deader than a deadline.’

  Elizabeth used only the kitchen, the library and a bedroom – otherwise she would have had to spend half the day fetching and carrying logs from the snow-clogged yard outside. She had restarted all the clocks, but then she stopped them again. The house was so huge and empty that the sound of ticking made her feel as if her life were sliding by; and the chimes always made her jump.

  She wasn’t alone all the time. Mrs Patrick called by every afternoon; and several friends had called by. Lenny had taken her out to dinner twice and on Sunday she had cooked him lunch. Their affection for each other grew each time they met. Elizabeth felt so natural with him. Although his wartime experiences and his marriage had .made him different – edgy, sometimes, and restless – he was still a part of her early life, when her family had been together, and her mind had been filled with gymkhanas and handsome horsemen and passionate kisses under the cherry-blossom trees.

  Lenny was in Hartford this week, although he telephoned her every evening at seven o’clock, just to tell her how much he missed her, and how boring insurance could be. What Elizabeth was looking forward to the most was Laura’s arrival. She hadn’t seen Laura for over a year now, although they still corresponded two or three times a month and sent each other photographs. Laura was flying to Idlewild and then taking the train. She was expected in New Milford mid-afternoon.

  Elizabeth sat at her father’s desk, leafing through page after page of business letters. Most were letters to the printers, and the binders, and the bank. There were a few letters from authors, some of them famous. A quick scribbled note from Marc Connelly; a neat ‘thank-you’ letter from Edna Ferber; and a rambling typed letter from Alexander Woollcott. There was also a letter from a local address, New Preston, signed by Miles Moreton. It read: ‘I am delighted that you want to publish my book Human Imagination: Our Immortal Soul? and I can certainly meet you for lunch at 12 noon on the 13th.’

  Elizabeth suddenly remembered that her father had told her to read Human Imagination, and to talk to its author, too. She walked along the shelves, trying to find it. Her father had been chronically untidy, the books were in no kind of order, but at last she discovered a thick black-jacketed book right at the very end of the second shelf. It had a plain typographical dust-jacket, but on the inside flap there was a photograph of a very thin, angular young man with curly hair and staring eyes, smoking a cigarette.

  Elizabeth lit a cigarette herself, and sat back in her father’s chair and started to read. Outside the french windows, it had started to snow again – huge, tumbling flakes that danced and whirled. The temperature had been steadily dropping since yesterday night, but the Reverend Bullock had telephoned to reassure Elizabeth that the funeral would go ahead, the grave had been dug before the ground froze. That problem hadn’t actually occurred to her, and she had stood for a long time in the hallway after she had hung up, thinking of the deep, cold, shoulder-wide trench in the ground into which her father would be lowered, and covered over, as if to mask his face from the sky.

  She had found it very difficult to come to terms with the fact that he had died, because the last warmth of her childhood security had died with him. Her mother couldn’t take care of her. Now she was truly on her own, and it was snowing.

  She smoked, and read, and while she read the day grew darker and darker.

  Imagination exists independently of all other brain functions. All other brain functions are concerned with response to quantifiable external stimuli – to cold, to heat, to pain, to caresses. Humans alone possess imagination. Even the so-called ‘sixth-sense’ that animals possess – for instance, the much-vaunted ability of dogs to be able to anticipate earthquakes – is only a highly-refined response to measurable ground-tremors and changes in atmospheric pressure. Dogs cannot imagine earthquakes, any more than cows can imagine rain. Animals cannot imagine that they are another animal, living in an another age, in another country.

  Humans, however, are capable of creating infinite worlds inside their heads. They can imagine that they are other people. They can even imagine that they are animals. One human can create an imaginary world, with imaginary people in it, and write about it, and that world can then be recreated, with certain personal adjustments, inside another human’s mind. Imagination is capable of taking on its own existence.

  There is anecdotal evidence that the human imagination is capable of outliving the human body and the reactive brain – that ‘ghosts’ are not the souls of people who have died while leaving some important corporeal business undone, or the spirits of those who are still seeking revenge for some terrible injustice that was done to them during their substantial lifetimes. Instead, ‘ghosts’ are the living resonance of that most powerful of human qualities, the ability to create out of nothing that which is not, and which never can be, and yet is just as real to the common consciousness as something that actually was.

  Who is the more real? Abraham Lincoln or Tom Sawyer? What is more real? Tara, or the Jefferson Memorial? If we can imagine a place or a person with complete conviction, is that not every bit as good as ‘reality’?

  In 1927, in New Orleans, a Negro pianist called John Michaels claimed to a reporter from the Times-Picayune that his dead brother had paid him a visit in the guise of a 13-year-old white boy called Philip LaSalle. His brother had shouted at him and persecuted him and woken him up, night after night, demanding that he got out of bed and worked. Some nights, his brother would even whip him with a riding-crop, and Michaels showed weals on his back to prove it – injuries that it would have been impossible for him to inflict on himself.

  After several months of this, Michaels was close to nervous collapse. He was interviewed by two doctors from the Pontchartrain Mental Institution, who concluded that he was sane and that he was telling the truth, although ‘the substance of his claim is beyond explanation and completely beggars belief.’

  Michaels’ brother was a full-blood Negro and had died of viral pneumonia at the age of 32. Anybody less like ‘Philip LaSalle’ would have been hard to find. However, two years after his death, some of his property was returned to Michaels from his brother’s lodgings in Baton Rouge. This property included the novel Sweet Remembrance by Chauncey Geffard – a popular story of life on a Southern plantation in the days before the Civil War. One of the principal characters in this book is a privileged young white boy who is given everything his heart desires – a horse, a carriage, and a fine rifle. He mistreats his slaves – whipping the men and seducing the girls – but one of the strands of the novel’s plot is the way in which he is gradually transformed by ill-luck and personal tragedy into a sympathetic character.

  The white boy’s name was Philip LaSalle.

  Michaels swore that he had never even heard of the book before his experience; and there was no obvious reason why he might have lied. He made no money from the newspapers or the magazines who ca
me to interview him, and he left New Orleans shortly afterward and went to live under a false name in Mobile, Alabama. On May 8, 1928, he was found moaning and covered in blood in his hotel room on Conception Street, and taken to hospital, where he died the next day. His injuries were consistent with a sustained thrashing with a cane or riding-crop.

  Before his death he was interviewed twice by Mobile police, and on both occasions he claimed that his assailant was white, aged about 13, and that his name was Philip LaSalle.

  Elizabeth laid the book down on the desk. The afternoon was so dark now that she could scarcely see to read. She switched on the amber-shaded Tiffany desk lamp and looked at the book, her chin in her hand. She didn’t know whether she wanted to read any more or not. All she knew was that Miles Moreton was trying to suggest that our imagination could outlive us, and that we could come to life again as anybody we chose to think of – even if that ‘somebody’ was fictitious, out of a novel.

  What was even more frightening was that – fictitious or not – they were still quite capable of hurting people, even killing them, as the swirling black shape in the garden had killed poor Dan Philips.

  She stood up, and went to the windows, and watched the snow. They reminded her so much of the snowflakes in The Snow Queen: ‘Those are the white bees swarming there . . . they have a Queen bee. She flies yonder where they swarm so thickly. She is the largest of them, and never remains upon the earth, but flies up again into the black cloud. Sometimes on a winter’s night she flies through the streets of the town, and breathes with her frosty breath upon the windows, and then they are covered with strange and beautiful forms, like trees and flowers.’