“What do you mean?” he asked, suspiciously.
“What I mean is, well, what if, let’s just say what if,” I said, forcing myself to sound as rational as possible while realizing that my situation was the equivalent of dancing in a minefield, “maybe there’s something else that got to be done first before Arrosha can kill me.”
“She can kill you any time she wants to and without ever lifting a finger!” he shouted, tensing the rope again, insulted.
“I know! I know!” I said, fighting the urge to cower. I had to be strong, I had to act like I knew what I was talking about if I had any chance of surviving this. If I showed weakness to Geoffrey, I knew it would all be over in minutes. “But let’s face it, Geoffrey, if that’s all there was to it, she would have done that herself a long time ago, wouldn’t she? There must be another element working in this equation, another variable, there just has to be. I don’t know what it is, I have no idea. Do you?”
“Go on,” he said, still callous but now interested, his murderous rage somewhat subsided.
“I don’t know, maybe there’s some kind of curse or something involved. Maybe there’s some kind of ceremony that has to be performed, some kind of ritual. Maybe she has to wait for the dark of the moon or for some astronomical alignment to take place first. Let’s face it, Geoffrey, if she’s a goddess and hasn’t killed me herself yet, if there’s something about me that’s such a huge obstacle to her, there’s got to be some metaphysics at work here that neither you nor I understand.”
Geoffrey became quite calm suddenly, putting down the rope as a serious expression replaced his earlier mad one.
“Good point,” he admitted.
“We wouldn’t want to screw this up for Arrosha, would we?” I said, taking a normal breath for the first time since he had grabbed me on the staircase.
“No, no,” he said, much more calmly, sanity in his voice once again. “That would be bad, very bad.”
“Wouldn’t it be better if you told the others, warned them about me?” I would pay for this later, I had no doubt in my mind about that, but I was praying that Ben would be able to intercede for me once I told him about Geoffrey’s actions tonight. “No matter how it turned out,” I continued in the smoothest, most convincing voice I could muster at the moment, “Arrosha would still know that it was your idea, that you spearheaded the project. No matter what needs to be done, she would still give you credit for it.”
“Why should I even involve the others? I could just lock you up in here until after I talk to Arrosha alone.”
“Because, if you do that, the others will wonder what became of me,” I continued, my mind peddling as fast as it could. “They will go looking for me and you’ll just wind up having to tell them anyway. That could make you look bad in their eyes, Geoffrey, and you don’t want that, do you? If you let them in on this up front, you’ll come out looking like a leader and that’s a lot better, isn’t it?”
“Yes, that’s true. I want them to see me as the strong leader that I am.” I could see the little wheels in his brain turning as he said this, working out the details of how to spin this new development into a major stepping stone to his ultimate promotion.
“So see, Geoffrey, handing me over to others, giving them direct orders to keep an eye on me until you can talk to Arrosha personally to make sure that you get all the credit, that’s what would serve you best.”
“Yes, yes, you’re right, it would.”
“And who knows, when this is all said and done, it might just turn out that I’m not the obstacle, not the enemy, after all.”
The words had barely escaped my lips when I knew I had said the wrong thing. The rage came back into his eyes in a flash, his face contorted once again with hatred.
“What do you think I am, stupid? Did you think that I would put my career in peril by killing you on just a hunch? I told you I had proof. Oh, that’s right, I almost forgot to show it to you. I almost got ahead of myself there, didn’t I? Well, let me remedy that right now. Here!”
He dragged me over to a large trunk sitting beneath the one small attic window in the room and pulled me down, forcing me to sit in front of it.
“This should be of special interest to you, my dear,” he said as he flung it open, crouching next to me. “This, you see,” he continued, “Is Arrosha’s file on traitors like you.”
The contents of the trunk seemed rifled through, in disarray.
“She, she showed you this?” I asked nervously. Up to this point, I’d been hoping that Geoffrey was just a lunatic acting alone, that this was all a bizarre fantasy of a psychotic imagination, that the others could protect me from him and his delusions. But if Arrosha had actually brought him in here and shown him a reason that I needed to be killed, then my hope of long-term survival was over.
“No, she didn’t have to. She expected me to believe on faith alone that you needed to be watched.”
“Then what is this?” I asked, confused.
“Oh, Ashley, give me some credit. If I’m to prove myself to her, I have to show initiative and if that means doing a little detective work to do it, so be it.”
“Detective work? What, walking into an unlocked room in your own home and opening an unlocked trunk. You call that detective work?”
“Of course not, don’t be insulting,” he replied haughtily. “Who said the lock and trunk were unlocked?”
“Geoffrey,” I said, shocked. “Don’t tell me you broke the locks.”
“Broke them? No, my dear, I learned how to pick them when I was a lad,” he beamed proudly. “When I was just a wee little thing, my old man trained me well. It’s the only good thing he ever taught me before he ditched the family a year later. It’s a skill that’s always come in handy for me, never more so than now.”
“Geoffrey, no,” I said, looking around the room lest Arrosha pop up behind us, a sense of real dread adding itself to my continuing fear. “This isn’t right on so many levels. I mean, if this was locked, it means it was private. Arrosha might be a goddess, but she is still a woman. I can tell you firsthand that women don’t like it when people start going through their private things.”
“That’s right, they don’t. But I’m not the one that broke in here and picked the locks. You did. Originally my plan was that you suspected there was something in the trunk that had revealed a terrible secret about yourself. Then you broke the locks and searched the trunk, finding it was true. Unable to live with the thought of anyone else finding out, you’d hung yourself. But now that plan isn’t going to work, is it? Oh, well, I’ll just have to tell the others how you broke into the room and into the trunk. I came up here to talk to Arrosha and found you rifling through her stuff.”
“They won’t believe you. I don’t even know how to pick a lock.”
“You’re wrong, dear. It’s you they won’t believe. Especially after they find the lock picks, along with your I.D., under the front doormat. Not a very original place to hide it, I’ll grant you, but you weren’t counting on becoming so ill. At the last minute, you simply didn’t have the wherewithal to find a better place.”
“You found my driver’s license?”
“Of course. It was in your pants pockets. Along with some cash and a set of keys.”
“You picked my pockets?”
“Why, Ashley, dear, how could I possibly be expected to frame you without it? I couldn’t exactly have Arrosha going around thinking that I was the one that broke into her personal store room. That would have been incredibly rude of me.”
“You bastard!”
“That’s exactly what dear old pops used to call me before he ran off. But that’s neither here nor there. Look at how richly my initiative has paid off,” he said, running his hands through the papers in the trunk.
“What’s that? What’s in there?” I asked.
“Everything that I promised you. Proof. It’s proof of who and what you really are.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
It was with a
combination of reluctance and morbid curiosity that I began to sift through the sheets of newspapers and photos in the trunk, wondering how these items could possibly pertain to me. If this were indeed Arrosha’s trunk, she had kept meticulous files. The pages were cut neatly from the rest of the paper and were mostly page after page of obituaries from newspapers from all around this country and others, each of which had one particular obituary circled, interspersed with the odd missing person’s report. The dates spanned years, decades, generally getting older the farther into the trunk I delved. They were more or less in chronological order, and I supposed that Geoffrey’s rifling through the contents must have accounted for the “less”. In the margins of these obituaries and reports, cause of death was neatly handwritten, usually described as one natural cause or another; heart attacks and aneurysms were prevalent as well as were congenital defects, those ticking time bombs from birth whose time had finally run out. Then there were the deaths from mysterious illnesses, causes unknown; and there were the occasional auto accident reports as well, the cause of which, when know, was inevitably noted as being somewhere along the lines of “asleep at the wheel” or “presumed died at the wheel”, usually from stroke, heart attack or aneurism. Sometimes these accident deaths came pared with headline stories of the wrecks. These more sensational deaths often contained gruesome photos, presumably from police files, although some of the older ones were frequently from one tabloid or another whose circulation depended upon the exploitation of human misery. Interestingly enough, none of these papers showed any of the usual yellowing or brittleness common to aging, not even with the cheaper newsprint stock.
Geoffrey was quiet and still as I examined the contents of the trunk, his eyes trained upon me, watching my every expression, my every reaction, lest I betray something. As I scanned the trunk’s contents, I allowed myself only the basic generic responses that almost anyone would have, especially whenever I came upon the tabloid photos of automobile accidents or the rare murder, invariably tied to another crime, such as a burglary or mugging. I hid from him, however, any tell-tale signs of the stirrings I felt inside as I went through these contents. Something was awakening in me, like a dream I once had years ago that was only now resurfacing from deep within my subconscious. I began to realize that in one respect, Geoffrey was right. I hadn’t wound up here by accident and I never would be a regular member of this group. I didn’t know why I felt the way I did, I didn’t know what it meant, but I did know that I was linked to all of the people in this trunk, reduced now to a pile of obituaries or missing persons, accident and murder reports. I knew somehow that they were all held together by a common thread other than just their deaths.
“It really goes back a long way,” Geoffrey said, the excitement of sharing his discovery momentarily overriding his anger and hatred of me. “Look, dig down nearer the bottom of the trunk,” he said, pushing me aside as he dug into the trunk himself, “and you’ll find this goes back to before the Civil War.”
He pulled out a large pile of papers from the very bottom of the trunk and shoved them at me.
“Look at this,” he said. “These at the very bottom are from the 1840’s.”
I took the papers and leaflets from him. While they were not yellowed or aged as I would have expected them to be, the old-fashioned typefaces belied their years and ink sketches replaced the photographs when warranted. Despite the difference in age, however, they all told the same stories as did their newer counterparts.
“Geoffrey, I still don’t know what this stuff has to do with me,” I said, trying to keep my voice and facial expressions neutral. I wasn’t exactly lying, because while a vague, nebulous truth was stirring inside me, much like a word sitting upon the edge of my tongue, I still could not quite retrieve it, its meaning still lost to me, still hidden from behind its thinning veil.
“Still denying it, huh,” Geoffrey accused harshly. “Okay, then, I’ve got a few more little tidbits to show you and then we’ll see how well you deny it. I found this box lying at the top of the trunk. I figure that what’s inside must be important, even more important than all the rest of it.”
Roughly, he shoved a wooden box into my hands.
“Go ahead, look through it. Take a good, long look and then tell me that you don’t know what I’m talking about.”
I set the letter-sized box on the floor in front of me and opened its lid. It held only a few papers and photos.
“This is just more of the same, Geoffrey,” I said, trying to sound as blasé as I possibly could.
“We’ll see about that. Go on, read them, take a good look,” he demanded.
I proceeded slowly. The other documents in the trunk had stirred something in me and if these papers had the same effect, I wanted to be able to absorb it, lest I give away anything to prove Geoffrey right.
Unlike the rest of the documentation, the dates on all of these were prominently displayed in the upper left-hand corner of each one, all written in the same handwriting as before. I could feel Geoffrey’s stare bore into me as I scanned the dates first; it seemed like the safest way to begin since I didn’t have to look at anything except the top document and the dates themselves. There weren’t many in this grouping, so it didn’t take long. Like the papers in the trunk, these were ordered chronologically, the newest at the top, the oldest at the bottom. Having done this, I began to peruse the story at the top of the pile, the one I’d been avoiding looking at while I’d been concentrating on seeing only the dates. It was a newspaper clipping from 1979 and read, “Minor League Player Still Missing”. It went on to say, “Max Podowski, pitcher for the minor league baseball team the St. Louis Tornadoes, is still missing after failing to report for practice two weeks ago. Max is 19 years of age, 6’4” tall, with light brown hair and blue eyes. He was last seen boarding a Transline bus from his home town of Topeka, Illinois, where it is reported that he bought a round-trip ticket to New Orleans, Louisiana. It is not known whether he reached his destination or not. Anyone with any information regarding him or his whereabouts is asked to contact local authorities.” The story clipping was attached to a photo of a smiling, handsome, strapping young man in a baseball uniform. He wore a determined, intent look upon his face as he held a typical pitcher’s pose. It must have been intended for use on a baseball card or some other publicity. While I was sure I’d never seen this man before, there was a quality about him that seemed very familiar.
The next set of documents were similar. Dated 1946, they also contained a newspaper clipping of a missing man paired with another photo, a studio portrait. This time it was a Zachary Preston, 39, chemist, 5’9”, husband, father of four, with a high forehead and dark, receding hair. He smiled out from his black and white photo from behind wire-rimmed glasses. Unlike the baseball player, there was nothing familiar to me about this man and yet I felt drawn to him somehow by a connection even stronger than the one that I had felt to the people whose obituaries lay buried in the trunk. Whatever memories that lay hidden in my mind were rising further and further to the surface, closer and closer to making themselves known to me. Would Geoffrey be able to read it upon my face when discovery finally did resurface?
“Geoffrey, this is morbid. I really can’t see the point to it. I want to stop now. I want to go back to bed.” While under different circumstances, I’d have jumped at a chance to rediscover my lost memories, I certainly didn’t want to do it in front of Geoffrey. He was far too dangerous a man.
“Quit stalling. Continue,” he commanded with coldness, not breaking his stare.
The next set of documents which were clipped together, had, at the top, a short, unfinished, unsigned letter dated September 4, 1901. Written in ink in an old-fashioned cursive, it read,
“Dearest Ma,
“I hope this letter finds your health much improved. I surely do miss you. Please tell the family and all my friends that I miss them too.
“I just this morning arrived in the port of New Orleans. It is a beautiful city
from what I’ve seen of it so far, but the weather is hot and it’s quite muggy. The people here tell me it is like this more often than not, so I don’t think that the climate would agree with you much.
“Ma, you won’t believe my luck at where I’m boarding. I’m staying at a mansion! Imagine, Ma, me, in a mansion! Well, it’s just a flat on the ground floor but I never stayed anywhere so grand. I was walking with Gus, a friend I made on the ship, he’s a nice guy and you would like him, Ma. Anyway, we was looking for a room when we passed by this fancy house. Well, the gate to this house opens and this black woman stops us and asks if we need a place to stay, says the man she works for is renting out a room. It’s fancy, Ma, nicer than anyplace I ever been in. It’s got the softest bed I ever slept in, too. It’s not just a room, either, it’s got a kitchen in the front room with a wood stove and a whole room with a bathtub and some big pots for us to use to boil water for the tub. I can’t wait to get take a bath. I might just soak for a whole week! (ha, ha) I know, you’re thinking I’m wasting my hard-earned money, but I’m not. It’s cheap, cheaper even than the rooms we was on our way to rent. I can’t figure it, but you never know with rich folk, sometimes they’re just so peculiar. I guess I’ll never get to stay in a place like this again in my whole life, so I might as well enjoy it. You were right, Ma, you always said I was born lucky.
“A nice fella took my photograph when we docked for a couple of days in Bristol. I know you wanted me to save my money and pictures are expensive, but I figured I’d send this to you so you wouldn’t forget what I look like (ha, ha).
“Work on the ship was hard but I’m strong so it did me good. When I make my fortune in America, I’m going to send for you…”
The letter stopped abruptly here. Something had interrupted it from ever being finished. I felt sorry for its writer and his mother, for somehow I knew this was the last he had ever written to anyone. He had died, been killed, only days after he sat down to pen this letter, which his mother had never received. This wasn’t mere supposition on my part; I knew the approximate length of his life after he was interrupted from paper and pen as surely as if it had appeared on the network news. I knew this man, somehow, some way; I had met him. There was no rational or logical explanation for how I could have possibly met a man that had died near the turn of the last century, I simply knew it was true.
The Nightmare Game Page 46