by Mike Ashley
“C’mon, you make us sound like something out of a John Jakes saga,” said her husband. “Really, though, Max, we’d appreciate some help from you.”
He was gazing out at the moonlit front acre. Turning to face his old friends, Max said, “Okay, I’ll come out of retirement.”
Gil said, “Great!”
“You’re lovely,” said Nita, coming over to hug him.
“For a couple of days anyway,” he added.
The young woman on the ten-speed bicycle said, “You’re Max Kearny.”
Nodding, Max kept on running. “And you’re a neighbor of the McNultys.”
The dark blonde said, settling into a speed which kept her beside him on the early morning lane, “I’m Kate Tillman, my husband is Bronco Sanhammel.”
“Used to play . . . football, didn’t he?”
“That’s him,” she said. “Reason I’m Tillman and he’s Sanhammel is I believe a woman ought to maintain her identity in marriage. Bronco doesn’t exactly agree, but he’s too busy at Malfunctions to argue.”
“What sort of malfunctions?”
“No, it’s the name of a company, Malfunction Studies International. A research organization based over in Stamford. They study companies and institutions and explain why they’re screwed up. Lots of clients these days. Your wife didn’t hold on to her own name.”
“No, she foolishly abandoned it years ago. How’d you know?”
“Read a frothy piece on you two in People last year. Do you find advertising a compromising trade?”
“A compromise with starvation.” As far as Max could recall, the half page of copy in People hadn’t mentioned his one-time ghost-breaking sideline. “I’d like to come over and talk to you and your husband sometime today. A sort of research thing I’m—”
“Bronco’s in Ethiopia,” Kate told him. “Looking into a donut factory that’s been turning them out square instead of round. We’re both individuals, though, and I can talk to you while he’s away. Do you always wheeze like this when you jog?”
“Only on the fifth and final mile,” Max admitted.
The young woman was frowning, studying him out of the corner of her eyes. “How old are you?”
“Forty-one.”
“That explains it, I’m twenty-nine. We come from different generations.”
“Is that still going around, generation gap?”
Kate’s frown deepened. “I’m trying to remember something else about you. Something from when I was a kid.”
“Way back in the dim and distant sixties?”
Her head bobbed in affirmation. “It was in some strange and sleazy magazine Uncle Alfie used to get . . . Right! You were a ghost detective, an occult investigator.”
“According to Nita and Gil, I still am.”
Downhill loomed the landscaped entryway to Hollow Hills Circle.
“Then I very much do want to talk to you, Max,” she said. “You don’t mind if I call you Max right off?”
“I expect such familiarity from your generation.”
“You’re teasing but I’m serious,” she said. “Why don’t you drop in for breakfast now? I’m a vegetarian, so I can’t offer you ham and sausage or any other dreadful traditional Sunday breakfast fare. We can talk, though about . . .”
“About what?”
“The hauntings.”
Max sat on the brick front porch of the Tillman-Sanhammel colonial, watching a carrion crow circle a nearby wooded area and aware of various thumpings coming from inside the house. A scruffy terrier cut across the vast front lawn, pausing to gruff once at him.
“Okay, all shipshape. You can come on in,” invited Kate from the now open front door.
Stretching up, his left knee making a creaking, Max went into the cool, spotless living room, which was furnished with stark functional furniture and tropical plants. There were bookcases built into one wall, and he noticed, while following her through to the kitchen, a gap of about two feet on the otherwise crowded shelves. “How long have you lived here?”
“I suppose that was an old-fashioned stereotyped female thing to do,” said Kate over her shoulder. “Tidying up before letting you in.”
“Warms the heart of us senior citizens.”
The kitchen was yellow, black and white, as angularly furnished as the living room.
Nodding at a square yellow table, Kate said, “What were you asking, Max?”
“How long you and Bronco have lived here in Hollow Hills.”
“Oh, just a bit over two months,” she said. “Before that we had a place over in Weston, but when Bronco got promoted to Assistant Foul-Up Field Research Man, we decided to move up the ladder a rung or two. Not that I’m into status.”
“Did you hear about this area through someone?”
She placed a glass teakettle on an electric burner of the stark black stove. “Rose hip or Red Zinger tea?”
“Dealer’s choice.”
Kate reached up and took a box of rose hip tea from a cabinet shelf. Her navy-blue jersey hiked, showing a smooth stretch of tan back. “Matter of fact, we knew some of the people who were already living here,” she said, busying herself with getting out two teabags and dropping them into a fat black teapot. “Actually I knew Boz Snowden and he’d spoken highly of Hollow Hills Circle.”
“You’re friends of the Snowdens?”
“Not exactly, I used to be Boz’s typist.” She turned, leaned against a counter. “He had a small place in Weston, too, before the tremendous success of Curse of the Demon.”
“You type the manuscript on that?”
Kate lifted the whistling kettle off the heat. “Yes, a good part of it,” she answered as she poured steaming water into the teapot. “How do soy pancakes sound? As the main course? Along with hashbrown rutabagas?”
“Yum-yum.”
“I suppose, depending on the mass food business for your livelihood, you have to pretend to enjoy eating garbage.”
“It’s required, yes. Garbage, sewage, all sorts of other unspeakable stuff. That’s what they pay me for.” He took the cup of tea she handed him. “You ready now to talk about the unusual things that’ve been going on hereabouts?”
Bending from the waist, bare back flashing again, she took a black mixing bowl from a low shelf. “Everyone has been bothered by strange things, Max, all the houses,” Kate said. “Strange noises during the witching hour, occult manifestations, ghostly materializations.”
“What do you think causes it all?”
She faced him again, bowl clutched to her chest. “I haven’t done as much digging into local history as I’d like,” she said. “I do know, though, that centuries ago there was some kind of devil-worshipping cult that flourished in these parts, Max. It seems most likely that what we’re experiencing is some sort of residual evil, a kind of supernatural toxic waste that’s built up.”
“What do you and your husband intend to do?”
Kate fetched two eggs from the squat yellow refrigerator. “Oh, Bronco isn’t here enough to be much bothered. And, as you may recall, when he played pro ball they dubbed him the Salinas Stoic.” She broke two eggs into the bowl. “Gibbering bathtubs and blood dripping from doorknobs doesn’t much faze him. I guess we’ll just sit it out. Sometimes, from what I’ve heard, these ghostly things end as suddenly as they began.”
“In Boz Snowden’s book it took two cardinals, a bishop and a psychic investigator to exorcize the demon who’d been dwelling in that old mansion on the Long Island Sound.”
Kate sniffed. “That’s fiction, Max.” Picking up a mixing spoon, she began working on the contents of the bowl.
The white wallphone rang.
She caught it on the second ring. “Yes?” Kate paused, listening. “I can’t talk to you now . . . It doesn’t sound as though you have anything new to say to me anyway . . . Oh, really? I . . . I’ll phone you later.” She hung up carefully. “Relatives, even distant ones, can be a pain.”
Max eased to his feet. “Ca
n I wash up someplace before breakfast?”
“Downstairs bathroom’s through the living room and along the hall on your right.”
“Thanks.” On his way there, Max stopped in the stark living room to take a look at the gap on the book shelf.
Shaved, showered and wearing old tennis shoes and denim slacks, Max cut across a grassy acre between the houses which ringed, informally, the circle. The sun was nearly at its midday mark in the clear blue sky.
On the close-cropped lawn directly in front of the Snowden house a long, tanned young woman in a fawn-colored bikini was spread-eagled on an air-cushion. Near her fluffy blonde head a tiny transistor radio was gurgling.
At the sound of Max’s sneaker on the gravel path leading to the front door, the blonde sat up. “Are you coming over to complain?”
He shook his head. “I’m Max Kearny, staying with the McNultys for a few—”
“Boz, my gifted husband, is very class-conscious. He’s got the dopey notion sunbathing annoys people and that I ought to do it out back in the privacy of our patio, except the sun’s better out front this time of day. It isn’t, besides, that I’m mother naked or indecent. He’s Boswell Snowden, author of Curse of the Demon. It’s a bestseller.”
“I know.” Max approached Tinkle Snowden across the bright grass. “Reason I dropped over, Nita McNulty, in her capacity as a real estate agent, has asked me to check out some complaints she’s been getting. Always anxious to keep all the residents of the circle as content as—”
“Complaints, maybe, about spooky noises?”
Halting, Max squatted at the edge of the polka-dot air mattress. “Have you been suffering from such disturbances, Mrs Snowden?”
“. . . climbing right up to the top of the charts, baby . . .” murmured the tiny radio.
“I guess you could say so. I mean, golly, the bathtub screams like a hooty owl, the toilet sounds like there’s a fat man drowning in it, and . . . well, well, and how do you like Connecticut, Mr Kearny?”
“Hum?”
“Nix, nix.” She hunched one bare shoulder at her colonial-style house, then whispered, “The electric typewriter’s stopped clacking. He’s probably watching us. From his studio.”
“Does he read lips?”
“Boz has a wide range of unusual talents. I don’t know, but he doesn’t want me to admit we’ve been having any trouble with our house.”
“Does he now? I’d have thought, since this is exactly the sort of thing he writes about in his novels, that he’d be eager to—”
“Heyo!” The front door flapped open, and while it was still quivering, the huge bearded Snowden emerged to stand squinting on the front porch. “What are you selling, buddy?”
“Slurp!” called Max. “But not to you. I’m a guest of the McNultys. Nita’s asked me to—”
“No comment.” Snowden came lumbering down across the lawn, a ballpoint pen gripped between his teeth.
“Nita’s very anxious to make certain the folks residing here are trouble-free and—”
“No comment,” replied the bear-like author. “I can emphasize that with a poke in the snoot.”
“Boz, don’t beat up Mr Kearny.” Tinkle hopped up. “He’s much dinkier than you.”
“Kearny? Kearny? I read about you someplace, saw a picture.”
“No doubt in People. About my wife and me, and my advertising agency.”
“Naw, this was when I was a kid and first got hooked on the supernatural . . .” His thick shaggy eyebrows tilted toward each other. “Yeah, you used to be a ghost breaker, a demon buster, an occult busybody.”
“In my vanished youth,” said Max. “Right now I’m just doing Nita a favor by—”
“We have nothing to say, Kearny.” Snowden raised a shaggy fist.
“But, Boz, maybe we ought to—”
“Shut your yap,” advised her husband.
“If you are suffering from any sort of occult manifestations, the publicity from that could only help your—”
“You’re going to suffer from a busted snoz if you don’t haul ass out of here.”
“Really?” Max remained facing the larger man.
After a second Snowden dropped his fist. “Tinkle’s right, I can’t smack a wimp like you.”
Grinning at them, Max said, “If either of you change your mind, I’m staying at the McNultys through Tuesday.” He walked away.
“Nice meeting you, Mr Kearny,” called Tinkle.
Max leaned his elbows on the metal patio table, studying the notes he’d scribbled on the pages of a yellow legal tablet after talking with all the beleaguered residents of the circle, shuffling through the maps and floorplans Nita’d provided. “Demonic possession . . . some sort of residual evil . . . an unsolved murder in the past . . . none of the above?”
Pipes and wrenches rattled. “Courting the muse?”
Glancing up, Max beheld a man in a tan suit at the edge of the flagstone patio, a tool chest dangling in one hand. “You must be Burt Nostradamus,” he said, pushing back in his deckchair.
Nostradamus was tall and lean, wearing dark glasses. “The village plumber.” He came over and sat opposite Max unbidden. “Yet in my heart dwell deeper yearnings.”
“Toward me?”
“I’m alluding to my dream of being some day a full-time professional writer,” the plumber explained. “The ambition first struck me one chill winter’s eve some years since while I labored to unearth the frozen pipe leading to the Hungerford’s cesspool. Flurries of snow assailed my slim frame, making white smudges across the black slate of the night. ‘Nostradamus,’ I exclaimed at that moment of insight, ‘there is more to life than dibbing into cesspools in the middle of the night.’ From that day I was dedicated to becoming an author.”
“How’ve you been doing?”
“Thus far I’ve sold seven articles to the National Intruder,” the plumber said, smiling faintly with pride. “I know I could get a full page in there if only Boz Snowden would cooperate.”
“You want to interview him?”
“This yarn is big enough to hit maybe even the wire services. If, that is, I can persuade Snowden to speak frankly and openly with me.”
“This all has something to do with the strange midnight happenings?”
The gaunt plumber dropped his toolkit with a thunking rattle. “I know of your work in the field of occult investigation, Mr Kearny,” he said in a confiding tone. “When I was but a small lad I read of your daring exploits in the very pages of the Intruder. Little did I dream that some fine day my own work would be gracing those selfsame pages, or that I’d meet such a—”
“You’re around the Circle a lot, aren’t you?”
“More than some realize,” replied the plumber. “In the interest of gathering material, I’ve been paying nocturnal visits. Indeed, I was here last night when the demonic manifestations occurred. Perhaps you noticed me, being more perceptive than the rest, as I moved hither and yon on the track of the unknown.”
“Were you out here on the patio?”
Nostradamus nodded. “It’s risky being out in the open when this devilish work is going on, yet for a story—”
“What about the empty house two houses to the left of us? You been in there?”
Shaking his head, the plumber said, “Not since we installed the plumbing some time since. Why? You don’t think a fellow occult investigator would stoop to housebreaking on the side.”
Max said, “What’s your theory as to what’s behind this all?”
“Boswell Snowden’s novel is a runaway bestseller, yet he writes little better than I do,” said the plumber. “His earlier novels, all of which I’ve read, are much worse even. Poorly plotted, filled with trite conventionalities and stilted prose. They did not sell.”
“Curse of the Demon is pretty well written.”
“The explanation is childishly simple, Mr Kearny,” said Nostradamus, leaning. “In order to insure himself a better prose style and to guarantee impressi
ve sales, I am certain what Snowden did. He did what greedy and ambitious men have done through the ages, entered into a pact with the devil.”
“You have any proof?”
“Nothing concrete, no,” admitted the gaunt plumber. “Yet, from all I’ve seen and heard here during the grim watches of the night, I know I am right. As soon as I can prove my case, then have I got a story for the Intruder.”
“What about all the things that are happening to the other houses?”
“Side effects,” said the plumber, sitting back.
Phone on his lap and receiver to his ear, Max sat alone in the McNulty living room and watched the twilight come sweeping slowly across Hollow Hills Circle.
“Hello?”
“We have a collect call from the Bowery, New York,” he said. “A Mr Maxwell Kearny Jr claims, as far as we can make out from his babbling, that he is your common-law spouse. Will you accept charges?”
“Oh, him. No, toss him back into his gutter and mention I’m on the brink of running away with the college boy who seeds the lawn.”
Max said, “Otherwise how are things, Jill?”
Jillian Kearny said, “Stephanie got a homer and a double today.”
“Admirable. Is she still the only girl in the Little League?”
“The only one on the Mill Valley Brewers. She’s out at practice this very moment, so you can’t talk to her. Did you buy her something?”
“It’s in my suitcase.”
“How are Nita and—”
“Listen, Jill, there’s something going on here.”
“Such as?”
He told her.
When he’d concluded she asked, “What’s this Kate Tillman look like?”
“Oh, your usual long-legged blonde, beautiful and highly intelligent. Just like most wives in Fairfield County,” he answered. “Little dinky auburn-haired ladies in their waning thirties they turn back at the border.”
Jillian said, “You’re investigating this whole frumus, huh?”
“Apparently so.”
“Couldn’t stay retired.”
“Nope.”
“So what do you think is afoot?”
“Somebody’s summoned up a demon,” he said. “All the manifestations point to that.”