The Astral

by V. J. Banis

  Any doubts she might have had faded entirely when she looked into his eyes. Even knowing he could not see her, she felt a chill of fear. The evil in those eyes was unchanged. Eyes trained on little Debbie like a hawk’s, watching her edge ever closer to him. And closer to the door that led into the mall, where a man and a small girl could be lost in minutes in the teeming crowd of shoppers.

  Catherine looked back at the child’s mother, still oblivious to her daughter’s straying. She stared hard at the back of the mother’s head, willing the woman to feel her presence, her energy. It had worked with Walter, once, in the quiet of his office—but would it work in a crowded department store, with a stranger who was engaged in earnest conversation?

  For long, agonizing seconds, it seemed as if nothing were happening. Lady Blue remained fully caught up in her shopping advice. Catherine worried over the child, wondering if she had drifted any closer to Yellow Beard, but she dared not look, dared not risk a break in her concentration. In frustration, she decided that she must, after all, let herself be seen. She moved into the woman’s line of sight.

  Suddenly, the mother frowned and glanced around. “Debbie?” she called, and then more loudly, “Debbie, where are you?”

  “I’m right here, mother,” Debbie called back.

  “Don’t you be wandering off, you get right back here, haven’t I told you never to go off like that? You gave me a fright.”

  “I was just looking around.” Debbie returned obediently to her mother, who stooped down to tug an errant scarf into place around her daughter’s neck and brush a sandy curl back from her forehead.

  “You just stay right here beside mommy, that’s a good girl. We’ll go in a minute. Now, as I was saying....” But when she straightened and turned back toward her shopping student, he was gone. She looked around, puzzled, but he had vanished.

  “Well, I guess he changed his mind,” she said in a disappointed voice. She dropped the sweater she had been holding on the counter. It really was a lovely shade, she thought, robin’s egg, too bad it wasn’t right for her. From the way the man had described his wife, though, she was sure it would have been perfect.

  Some people, she thought, tossing her head. She took Debbie’s hand. “Let’s go look at the toys, shall we?”

  Catherine looked around. Yellow Beard, too, had vanished.

  * * * *

  Trash Can Paterson moved quickly, carefully, through the holiday crowds, showing no outward sign of the anger that raged within him. Ahead of him Cooley walked hurriedly toward the exit and the van waiting in the parking lot. Neither of them took any notice of the other.

  Paterson swore over and over to himself. A woman, arms filled with packages, stopped just in front of him. He resisted the urge to shove her aside and stepped around her instead. Don’t call attention. It was his mantra on these shopping expeditions. Attention could be fatal.

  They had nearly been successful. They came so close. Everything had gone smoothly, like clockwork. The little girl had practically walked into his arms—and then something had happened, something to alert the mother.

  She had been there, he was certain of it, even though he hadn’t actually seen her. He had felt her as sure as if she had been standing alongside him. It was her who had interfered in some way that he couldn’t quite figure out.

  Who was she? He had to find her.

  * * * *

  “Are you all right?”

  Catherine took a breath and looked at herself, pale and shaky, in the mirror. Over her shoulder, she saw Mrs. White regarding her anxiously.

  “Yes, thanks.” Catherine relinquished her hold on the counter’s marble edge. Despite the lingering pain in her head, she was able to smile reassuringly. She left a nervous Mrs. White looking after her.

  Score one for our side, she thought. They were right: it was something she could do. She had foiled what surely would have been another kidnapping, perhaps another death. She had to restrain herself from a fist pump and settled instead for startling Mrs. Pendergrast with a triumphant smile.

  Back at her desk, however, she admitted more soberly that, wonderful as it had been, it wasn’t enough. Fending them off one time didn’t stop them. Those two must be caught, put behind bars and out of action altogether. That, apparently, was why she had been sent back, why she had been given the gift of astral projection, what she was intended to do. Exactly how she was to do that, she had no idea as yet, but she knew now clearly that she could never stop until she had achieved that goal.

  Still, she had made a start today, a significant start. Take that, you bastards, she thought with a grim smile.

  Her sense of triumphant exultation was short-lived. It vanished like a candle flame blown out in the cold wind of malevolence that swept over and through her the next minute.

  Her office darkened, not so much as if the light faded but more as if it were being sucked out of the room. She had a sense, growing stronger every second, of his presence. She could all but see him in the corner there, his angry eyes devouring her.

  CHAPTER TEN

  “Mrs. Desmond?” Bill spoke her name from the doorway. For just a second, no more, he seemed to be backlit with a faint golden glow. As she blinked and looked at him again, it vanished. Or maybe it hadn’t been there at all.

  The blackness was gone too. She was still in her office, in the ordinary light of day and the glow from the overhead fluorescents.

  “It’s nothing.” She managed a tremulous smile. “I just—I realized I had forgotten something important. Here, be an angel, won’t you, and finish these up.” She snatched some papers from her desk, hardly noticing what they were, and thrust them at him.

  “Sure thing,” he said. He gave her a queer look, but he took them and nodded and turned away.

  His boss, he thought, was acting plenty weird these days. All in all, he guessed he couldn’t blame her. He had always liked her, that quiet elegance that you couldn’t pretend to have if you didn’t. She was aloof, true. In the past she had kept a careful distance between them, but he had eventually come to see that it wasn’t just him. He wasn’t sure if anyone ever got really close to her.

  She seemed to be loosening up these days, though, and he would like to have asked what had frightened her so a moment ago, but they weren’t quite that chummy yet.

  He looked at the papers she had handed him. Receipts, telephone memos, the odd clipping, even a catalog from Williams-Sonoma. “Now what on earth,” he wondered, “Does she expect me to do with these?”

  * * * *

  Alone in her office, Catherine sat down weakly at her desk. Her heart threatened to pound its way through her rib cage. She tried to think what had happened. She hadn’t the slightest doubt who had visited her. But why? And more importantly, how?

  Of their own accord, her eyes raked the corners of the room, as if he might still be there, leering at her, but the office was empty.

  She shuddered. Had she somehow drawn him to her? She had thought after all that “traveling” to those two was going to be safe, so long as they couldn’t see her. Now, in some inexplicable way, Yellow Beard was stalking her.

  “Hey.”

  Catherine jumped and looked up to see Fermin Dean in her doorway. “Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you,” he said, “Are you all right? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  She wondered briefly what he would think if she said she had. Probably, he would think she was losing her marbles. He might be right.

  “Just a little on edge,” she said.

  “I’m buying some of the boys a Christmas drink at The Polo Lounge. Care to join us?”

  She was on the verge of declining, still haunted by Yellow Beard’s horrible presence, but she couldn’t exactly explain that to Fermin. Anyway, she wasn’t sure that she wanted to be alone just now. Maybe a room full of convivial people was what she needed.

  “I would love to,” she said instead. “If I really can be just one of the boys.”

  Fermin laughed. “Well,
yes, but let it be said, you look lots better in a dress than the others.”

  * * * *

  Jack, who didn’t much like parties to begin with, glanced for the umpteenth time at his watch and wondered yet again if it was still too early to leave. He would rather have not come at all, but when the station’s owner rents a suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel for a Christmas party, one did have a degree of obligation. Particularly when Peter Weitman had specifically asked him to attend.

  “The boss asked for you in particular,” was how he had put it, which did make the obligation a bit weightier. Peter had given him his job, after all, and if he could repay the favor in some measure by sipping a weak Chivas and water and listening to some not-very-amusing banter, it seemed the least he could do.

  “You wouldn’t be thinking of slipping away, would you?” someone said beside him.

  He turned toward the voice. Kitty Fane, the station’s new weatherperson, regarded him with eyes both amused and speculative. They had been introduced briefly before and he had watched her initial performance on the monitor in his office. She was pretty, in a reedy way, though personally he liked his women with a little more substance than she carried on her slight frame. Her hair was auburn and the eyes gazing into his were green and large, made larger still by generous shading of brown and green. The hand she laid on his arm sported black fingernails. Why on earth, he wondered, would anyone want black fingernails? They made her otherwise lovely fingers look like talons.

  “Because if you are,” she said with a smile, “I do wish you would take me with you. This is a bit of a bore, isn’t it?”

  He smiled back, patiently. “You wouldn’t want the old man to hear you say that,” he cautioned.

  She threw a quick look over her shoulder, but the nearest party guests were several feet away and engrossed in their own conversations.

  She smiled back at Jack. “Well, were you?” she asked.

  “Leaving?” He glanced again at his watch. “I think it’s a bit early yet for that. And here he comes, by the way.” Peter Weitman and Thaddeus Tremayne—the old man—were making their way through the cocktail party crowd that, like the Red Sea, parted before them, following a path that must inevitably bring them to where he and Kitty Fane were standing.

  Kitty might try her wiles out on him, Jack thought with amusement, but she knew only too well where the main chance lay. She drew her shoulders back like a boxer entering the ring, making her small breasts more prominent in the shimmering emerald green dress she wore, and turned to greet the newcomers, her smile wide.

  Weitman did the introductions. Kitty laid it on a bit thick, Jack thought. “I can’t tell you what a thrill this is,” she said, holding Tremayne’s hand a trifle longer than was necessary and gazing up at him with something of Titian’s Adoration in her expression.

  Jack saw that Thaddeus Tremayne was no more immune to flattery from an attractive woman than any other man, but he had a solid reputation too as a hard-headed businessman, and after a few chatty remarks, he said, “I wanted to have a few words with this young man, if you’ll excuse us.”

  Kitty made a moue of disappointment. “Of course, but I insist on equal time.”

  “Agreed.” It looked as if she had scored a point with the owner, though it was said by experts that you could never know what was going on behind that polite mask Tremayne wore.

  “I’ll be waiting,” she said. She flashed a coy smile and moved in the direction of the bar.

  “Pretty.” Tremayne watched her walk away from them, emerald-clad hips swaying provocatively.

  When he turned his gaze to Jack, it was all business, however. “I told Peter I particularly wanted a chance to meet you. I wanted to tell you that we’ve been getting lots of really good feedback on the pieces you’ve done.”

  Behind him, Weitman wore a pleased-as-punch grin. Jack, after all, had been his find. He gave Jack a quick wink.

  “I’m glad to hear it,” Jack said, “but I hope you’ll understand if I say I’d like to think some of it was negative. My goal is to get people thinking for themselves, and if they’re all parroting my opinions, I’m not doing my job.”

  “Then I can tell you that there is enough disagreement to assure that your job is being done nicely, and no more than just enough. I especially liked that piece last week on the Middle East.”

  “That’s one area, at least, where we don’t have to worry about everyone’s agreeing.”

  “Just so.” Tremayne smiled benevolently and looked at someone over Jack’s head, a signal that Jack took to mean their conversation was finished. “Keep up the good work. And I think you’ll find a pleasant surprise in your next pay check.”

  Jack, who felt he was already exorbitantly paid for doing nothing more than spouting off his opinions, could only mutter a quick thanks, but Tremayne was already on his way with a brief dismissive nod. Weitman paused to clap Jack on the shoulder and whisper a hasty, “Good job.”

  His reason for coming having been accomplished, Jack thought it was probably safe to start planning his exit. He did a brief tour of the room, stopping here and there to chat with a colleague, and declining the offer of a fresh drink from a black-jacketed waiter with a tray. Within the half hour he was slipping into his well-traveled trench coat, but before he made it out the door, a hand grabbed his arm and he looked down at black fingernails.

  “Do take me with you, please.” Kitty glanced up at him with one of her most alluring smiles. “I so hate to be seen leaving a party alone.”

  “I’m sure there is not a man here who wouldn’t happily solve that problem for you,” he said gallantly, but he fetched her coat for her and helped her into it—sable, he noted, and very good sable, too. Miss Fane was generous with herself. Or somebody was. “I thought you were going to have a conversation with the old man.”

  Her smile this time was conspiratorial and just a trifle smug, which told more clearly than words that it had been, in her terms, a successful conversation. “Mission accomplished,” she said.

  They exchanged nothing more than some desultory remarks as they rode the elevator down, but when they came out the lobby doors to the wide front steps, where he had supposed they would part, she held on to his arm. “I have a bottle of Moet Chandon in the fridge, if you’d like to stop by,” she said. “And I’m practically just around the corner.”

  “I’ll have to skip that corner this evening.” As gently as he could, he freed his arm. “Previous engagement.” She needn’t know that it was with a Graham Green novel.

  “One that can’t be broken?” She arched an eyebrow but he gave her an apologetic grimace. “Then you’ll have to take a rain check,” she said with a weatherperson’s undiminished cheeriness.

  She handed him a scrap of paper from the pocket of her sable. He glanced and saw that she had already written her number on it. Miss Fane liked to be prepared, apparently, for any eventuality.

  “Call me,” The invitation in her eyes hinted at more than a glass of wine.

  * * * *

  Pulling into the long, sweeping driveway of the Beverly Hills Hotel, Catherine wondered, not for the first time, how it was possible that all of the young valet parkers could be so movie-star gorgeous. The one dashing toward her Jaguar could have stepped right off the big screen.

  She was half in, half out of the car, when she glanced toward the lobby doors, where the wide steps swept down to the driveway, and saw Jack McKenzie come out of the hotel with a stunning redhead on his arm. He turned so that his back was toward Catherine, but there was no mistaking the look the redhead slanted up at him.

  Disappointment—and jealousy, no point pretending to oneself—stabbed at her. Well, what did you expect, she demanded angrily of herself, it’s not as if he’s taken the vows or anything? He’s a man, dammit. And trust him to pick a beautiful companion. Beautiful, if a trifle obvious.

  The towheaded valet held the door wide for her and gave her a smile that would have done a toothpaste commercial proud
. She shook her head, biting her lip to avert the tears that threatened, fumbled in her purse for a twenty-dollar bill and thrust it into the waiting hand.

  “Sorry, I’ve changed my mind.” She gave her head a shake.

  He glanced at the twenty and gave her another toothpaste commercial. “Please come again. My name’s Larry, by the way.” She had no doubt that he had sold his toothpaste to more than a few single ladies arriving at this fabled location.

  “Mine’s not,” she said and was already driving forward by the time he swung the door closed for her. She kept her head turned, hoping that Jack wouldn’t see her, until she was going down the other end of the curved driveway, and in a minute more she was merging into the traffic on Sunset Boulevard, and she could safely brush a tear away from her cheek.

  * * * *

  Watching her taillights disappear, Jack cursed Kitty Fane, still smiling up at him, for her would-be seduction.

  “Is something wrong? You looked so funny for a minute,” she said.

  No, that wasn’t fair, it wasn’t Kitty’s fault, wasn’t anyone fault, as far as that went. It was just damned bad luck was all.

  “Sorry,” he said apologetically. “I was just thinking of something.”

  “I hope you were reconsidering that champagne.”

  For a moment, meeting her eyes, he actually thought about changing his mind. Not that Kitty Fane looked any more appealing to him, but Graham Green somehow seemed less.

  He flirted with that temptation only briefly, however. He had a notion that Kitty’s charm, thin as it was already, would grow a lot thinner in the course of an evening. He wanted more from a woman than what she was so obviously offering, and he doubted very much that she had it to give.

  “Sorry. Afraid it’s not in the cards. Well, good night now,” he said and was off down the steps, signaling for one of the valets, before she could offer any further enticements.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Back in her apartment, Catherine changed into jeans and an oversized cashmere pullover, poured a glass of wine, and settled into a serious bout of floor pacing. She berated herself for a fool, for not having called Jack before this, raged at him for his infidelity—never mind that he had no reason to practice fidelity—found the world in general and all things upon it to be wanting. Had, in short, a wonderful session of feeling sorry for herself.