by Harvey Click
He knew she was dead, but he kept expecting her to call. It didn’t seem possible that she was never going to call again or come over again or put her head on his shoulder again or do anything again. They’d been together for three years, and he couldn’t imagine she was gone forever. He had wanted to marry her and have children with her, but he couldn’t bear to think about that right now.
One of her sweaters was still draped over the sofa. She’d put it on the other night when it got so chilly. Mark reached for it and smelled her perfume in the wool. He shut his eyes and saw her sitting on the sofa, saw the silly way she knitted her brow when she watched TV or read a novel. He saw her undressing, saw the way she always looked down as she undid the buttons and unhooked her bra, still shy about showing him her body even after three years. No one else looked like her, no one else had her quirky gestures or her delicate voice.
He wasn’t good at crying, and the tears hurt like blood leaking from wounded eyes. He stared at a beer commercial and reached for his silver cigarette case, something Linda had found for him at a second-hand store. He had never much cared for it, but it had saved his life. The tall man’s dart had struck the case and glanced off to give him just a little scratch, and that little scratch had been enough to overwhelm his heart and bring it to a standstill. The lab hadn’t been able to identify the poison yet, but if he’d gotten a few more molecules of it he wouldn’t be sitting here crying.
A sexy young couple in a car commercial was gliding up a mountain road toward a rainbow. Mark turned off the TV and then turned it back on because the silence sounded too much like the soundless roar of purple flames raging out of the pit. Linda had saved his life with the cigarette case, but there wasn’t anything he could do to save her from that hideous darkness.
He went to the kitchen and opened a beer. He didn’t believe in hell though he had seen its mouth stretch open. He didn’t believe in God though he’d seen a city of gold. He didn’t believe in life after death though he’d been there.
Linda had always believed in such things, reincarnation and Edgar Cayce and UFOs. Maybe she was right.
He remembered she had a friend who was a spiritualist medium, but he had never met her and couldn’t quite remember her name. Tara? Tonya? He found Linda’s address book and there it was—Toya Jones. He dialed the number, and while it rang he wondered if it was going to be this easy to call up Linda.
***
Several miles and many dollars separated Mark’s suburban condo from Toya Jones’s shabby rowhouse apartment north of campus. He heard the football crowd cheering in the stadium less than a mile away as he knocked on her door, and he wondered what there was to cheer about. A young woman opened the door and smiled, but her eyes didn’t look happy. Mark introduced himself and tried to smile back.
“Linda’s told me all about you,” Toya said. “Guess I know you pretty well already.”
Long frizzy golden hair half hid a narrow face with pale blue eyes. She slurred her words slightly, maybe because of the little silver barbell stuck through the tip of her tongue. Silver rings glinted in her earlobes and another one in her lower lip. She was slender and leggy, wearing blue jeans and a flannel shirt tied several inches above her belly button. She had two more rings there.
“Funny we never met,” he said.
“Yeah,” Toya said. “I guess some things Linda liked to keep to herself.”
Mark wondered what that meant. He followed her into a small living room thick with cigarette smoke and incense. It looked cluttered without containing much, and the little it contained looked cheap and worn out. The dining room was smaller. Purple drapes strained the sunlight to a reddish murk, yellowed here and there by flickering candles. The canvasses on the walls showed more paint than talent. One of them was probably a self-portrait, a sunburst of bright blonde hair surrounding a narrow white face. Not very flattering: Toya was prettier than that.
“Sit down,” she said.
There was a card table with two metal folding chairs, and they sat facing each other. Toya lit a candle stuck in a beer bottle and then lit a cigarette, so Mark lit one too.
“What makes you think Linda’s dead?” she asked. “TV said just missing.”
“She’s dead all right,” Mark said. He told her what he knew, beginning with Linda’s phone call about the locket. When he was done, he remembered he hadn’t intended to give her so much information. That made it too easy for her to fake the séance.
“I feel awful,” Toya said. “Linda was just about my best friend.”
Her face looked unguarded like a child’s. It veered from an earnest frown to something just this side of tears, and then gave him a wistful smile. “You look exactly like she described you,” she said.
“Is that good or bad?”
“Nothing but good. Linda loved you a whole lot. That’s why she was afraid of showing you her real self. She was afraid you wouldn’t accept it.”
Mark didn’t like her implying that she knew Linda better than he did. She was probably just warming up for her magic act, getting ready to mix a dab of pop psychology with a few facts about Linda to make him feel he was getting his money’s worth. But she didn’t have the face of a huckster.
“We didn’t keep secrets from each other,” he said.
Her expression changed again, and he wasn’t sure what the faint smirk meant.
“Why do you want to talk to her?” she asked.
“Because she’s in trouble.” Mark ground out his cigarette in a dirty ashtray and already wanted another one. “That pit I saw wasn’t any hallucination, I’m sure of that. She was yelling for help, but I don’t know what to do.”
“I know all about that pit,” Toya said. “It’s bad news, but I think maybe we can help her.”
“How?”
“We can talk her out of it.”
“I don’t think it’s that simple.”
“You got a better idea?”
“No.”
“Trust me,” she said. “I’ve been talking to dead people for a long time. It’s gonna be weird doing it for a close friend, though. I tried it once and was sick for a week. If you let your emotions get wrapped up with an evoked spirit, things get freaky.”
She seemed to be building her price up. “That’s okay,” Mark said. “I’ll pay you double, whatever you want.”
Toya’s face found a new expression: pissed off. “If you think this is about money, you can get out right now,” she said. “I got better ways to spend my time.”
“Sorry, didn’t mean to offend you. Still, I’d like to give you something.”
“Suit yourself,” she said. “I got bills like everyone else.”
He had no idea how much to pay her and was afraid to ask. He pulled all the cash out of his wallet and handed it to her, maybe eighty or a hundred, he wasn’t sure. Toya stuffed it in her shirt pocket and tossed her head haughtily. But then her sunny hair fell over her sky-blue eyes again, and they softened and seemed to smile.
“I’m gonna put on some music me and Linda used to listen to,” she said. She got up and fiddled with a cheap tape player, and an insipid New Age piece began to play, wood flutes and bird chirps. She sat back down and said, “Okay, here goes.”
She shut her eyes and started breathing deeply and slowly. Her flannel shirt sagged open and showed one of her breasts as she leaned forward, and Mark looked away. He stared at the guttering candle and wondered why he’d never met her before. He must have met every other friend Linda had, but she’d kept this part of her life to herself the same way she used to tuck her books about spiritualism and Edgar Cayce under a stack of magazines so he wouldn’t notice she was reading them. Maybe Toya was right about Linda keeping her real self hidden from him. Maybe Toya knew her better than he did.
His thoughts were shattered by an ugly moan welling up from Toya’s throat like the noise Linda used to make when she was having a nightmare. Pale blue eyes stared at him wide open like two terrified windows to hell.
&
nbsp; “Mark, are you here?”
It was Linda’s voice, so thick with fear that he thought maybe this wasn’t just an act. But of course Toya knew Linda’s voice well enough to imitate it. Mark had prepared a few questions to ask as a test, things only Linda could know, but he was too unnerved to remember them.
“Get me out of here!” she suddenly screamed.
“Linda, is that you?” he asked.
“It’s horrible here,” she said. “Get me out of here, please, please!”
“Where are you?”
“I don’t know, it’s too dark to see. Like a tiny prison cell, cold wet stones, bugs crawling all over my skin. They go up my nose when I sleep, worms and centipedes and things, I don’t know. Just get me out of here, please, please!”
She started crying, and tears poured down Toya’s face.
“Is anyone else there?” he asked.
“Sometimes a man comes in with food,” she said. “He unlocks the door and then I can see a little light, but it hurts my eyes.”
“Who is he?”
“I don’t know. He says he’s God, but I don’t like him. He has bad breath.”
“Tell me how to help you and I’ll do it,” he said.
“I don’t even know where I am,” she said. She cried harder. “I was in some old gas station, but I don’t think I’m there anymore. Can you get me out of here or not?”
It occurred to him that Linda didn’t realize she was dead. He didn’t want to tell her.
“Where did you find the locket?” he asked.
“That little shop on High Street, what’s it called? Stephen Briggs’ Collectibles. It started talking to me and I thought I was crazy, but I’m not. I know this place is real. Jesus, Mark, there’s not even a toilet here, I have to pee on the filthy floor. I’m sick and I want to go home. Something’s wrong with my head, dizzy all the time and my nose keeps bleeding.”
Tears poured down Toya’s face, expression just like Linda’s.
“I’m trying to help,” he said. “But you’ve got to tell me where to start. Who’s the man in black I saw you with?”
“I don’t know, he has a scar—”
Linda’s voice strangled shut with a harsh rattle like a burst of static. Toya sat rigid as a corpse, eyes wide staring blankly and hands pressing hard against the card table. Her fingers started shaking, and the convulsion swept up her arms to her face and made her teeth chatter and her eyelids tremble. She fell forward and knocked over the candle.
Mark jumped up and slapped out the flame before it could catch her hair. He grasped her shoulders and held her upright in the chair until the shaking stopped. She felt limp for half a minute, and then he felt her strength returning. She rubbed her eyes and groaned.
“You okay?” he asked.
She didn’t answer. He went to her narrow kitchen, cluttered with dirty dishes, and found an open bottle of cheap Chablis in the refrigerator. He poured a glass and brought it to her, and she sucked it dry in a few seconds. Her pale face looked exhausted.
“Jeez,” she said at last. “What a fucking head trip.”
Chapter Seven
The sun was low by the time Dexter got to Cincinnati. He spent another half hour looking for Grimes’ place, though it was just a few miles out of town on a well-traveled road with fields of new homes crammed between a few old farmhouses bereft of their farms. His corner lot was much larger than the others, many acres it seemed, but it looked like an uninhabited woods, and Dexter drove past it several times before he noticed the mailbox and the narrow mouth of a gravel driveway. It snaked through trees and brush that eventually gave way to scraggly grass pocked with weedy memories of flower beds, and then he could see the big Victorian brick house. The windows were barred with iron, and the slate roof resembled the sloping forehead of an ape.
He parked in front of a stone carriage-house garage and followed a flagstone path to a front porch overgrown with ivy. As he pounded the brass knocker shaped like a vaguely human face, a dandruff of rust fell from ten iron studs forming a pentagram on the heavy oak door. It opened and Michael Grimes smiled, his silver front tooth glinting like the silver frames of his glasses.
“Ah, I’m delighted that you found my little nest, Dr. Radcliff. It has a way of hiding itself—no?”
Dexter had forgotten that Grimes was half a head shorter than his own six feet plus. The way he stood, slender frame military straight, gave the impression of height and authority. He wore an expensive gray suit and carried his serpentine walking stick tucked neatly beneath his left arm like an officer’s swagger stick.
Dexter nodded curtly and stepped into a large foyer with mahogany wainscoting. Swords, maces, and polished bucklers decorated the walls, and a gleaming suit of armor guarded the shadows beside a wide stairs curving to a shadowy upper hallway. A husky odor of lavender tinged the air.
Grimes shut the door and quickly touched each of the iron studs, which extended like rivets through the wood. Dexter wondered if this was a superstitious ritual intended to bring good luck; occultists were a strange breed.
“It’s a pleasure to see you again,” Grimes said. “I’ve been looking forward to showing you a few of my trinkets.”
He opened a door off the foyer, and Dexter followed him into a large room with masks mounted on the walls above glass-covered display cases filled with Native American ceremonial objects. Grimes pointed out an engraved stone. “Isn’t it curious how these Mayan inscriptions resemble Egyptian hieroglyphs?” he asked.
“This isn’t why I’m here,” Dexter said, though any other time he would have been eager to study the markings. “Tell me how you know Mary Ash.”
“I can’t say I know her any more than you do,” Grimes said. “Who can truly know a woman? She came here some months ago and was interested in acquiring an item similar to the one you say has been stolen. Naturally, if I owned such a piece I wouldn’t wish to sell it, and she showed no interest in my other artifacts.”
“I think you know more than that,” Dexter said.
“If I didn’t, I’d be a very stupid man.” Grimes pointed his walking stick at a mask woven of corn husks. “There’s a fascinating story behind this Iroquois relic.”
“Yeah well, I like stories that add up to something,” Dexter said. “I think what this one adds up to is that you and Mary are in it together.”
Grimes smiled. “Dr. Radcliff, you speak so bluntly. Your voice is quiet but it bristles like the hair of a wolf. I daresay you have more the spirit of a warrior than an academician. That’s good, your skills may save your skin.”
“What skills?”
“Karate, boxing, fencing, firearms, shall I go on?” Grimes said. “I believe you once broke your arm in a bout of jujitsu. One might conjecture that all your life you’ve been preparing for Armageddon. I wonder, was it your parents’ untimely death that instilled in you this passion for the arts of war?”
Dexter glared at him. “I guess Mary told you my life story.”
“No, I prefer more reliable sources of information,” Grimes said.
“If you’re not working with her, then why’d she write a clever little note telling me to see you?”
Grimes shrugged. “Who can understand women? The arcana of alchemy are so much simpler.”
“You could have made these wisecracks over the phone,” Dexter said. “I drove here because I want some answers.”
“I’ll tell you nothing if you try to bully me,” Grimes said. “I believe in courtesy and custom. Now, shall we move from the New World to the Old?”
Dexter followed him into the next room, where there were more glass cases and the smell of lavender was stronger.
“I can see I’m wasting my time here,” he said.
“Then go home, Dr. Radcliff. I daresay the assassins won’t waste much of your time. Or you can feign some interest in my collection for a few minutes, and perhaps you’ll learn something that may save your life.”
Dexter gritted his teeth and glanced at o
ne of the cases. It was filled with amulets and periapts, crystals and stones, alchemic apparatuses and caducei, phylacteries and philters, stone scarabs and dried beetles, masks made of metal and masks of skin, swords, scepters, and wands.
“Would you care to examine any of them?” Grimes asked.
“No thanks,” Dexter said. “I’ve seen plenty of charms and fetishes like these. They’re all supposed to make wishes come true, but they don’t.”
“You sound remarkably skeptical for a man who’s devoted his life to the study of magic.”
“That’s exactly why I’m skeptical,” Dexter said. “I’ve observed voodoo ceremonies, séances, faith healings, conjurations, you name it, and ninety-nine percent of what seems miraculous is the power of suggestion.”
“What about the other one percent?” Grimes asked.
“I don’t know, I haven’t found it yet.”
“Haven’t you?” Grimes opened the display case and removed a pair of seashells attached to a braided leather band. “Perhaps you’ll find these listening shells interesting,” he said. “They’re from an extinct species of marine mollusk. Notice there’s a green stone embedded inside each one. It’s a crystalline garnet found only in the igneous rock left by a single volcano, also extinct. The garnets have the unique ability to collect what adepts call ethereal information.”
“Sure they do,” Dexter said. “Except ‘ethereal information’ sounds a lot like imagination, and if I took the garnets to a gemologist he’d probably say they’re glass.”
“Why trust a gemologist?” Grimes said. “They too can be charlatans. Put them on and see for yourself.”
“Not now.”
“Courtesy, Dr. Radcliff, courtesy.”
Grimes slipped the leather band around Dexter’s head and adjusted the shells over his ears. There was the familiar seashell illusion of roaring echoes that resembled ocean waves, but they carried sharp sudden sounds like the cries of drowning sailors.
“Can you hear me?” Grimes asked. His voice sounded far away or somewhere deep inside Dexter’s skull.