999

by Al Sarrantonio

  Screaming.

  Chapter Eight

  Case lifted an eyebrow.

  “Refresh your drink?” he asked.

  “Refresh my life,” Freeboard muttered.

  Broody, quietly on edge, a little drunk, she was slouched in a stool at the library bar as she tamped out her Camel Lite in an ashtray overflowing with a smother of crushed, bent butts. Behind the counter Case picked up a fluted martini pitcher and poured into Freeboard’s glass before beginning to prepare another batch.

  “That’s all of it,” he murmured. “I’ll have more in just a shake.”

  Freeboard woozily lifted her glass. “Salud!”

  They had been at the bar for almost an hour. Freeboard had wanted a drink. She’d had several, and was verging on fluency in several languages theretofore unrecorded by man. In the meantime, their conversation had been casual, much of it centered on questions by Case about “your fascinating friend, Mr. Terence Dare.” Now the Realtor observed with fogged, droopy eyes as Case poured Bombay gin atop the ice cubes that he had just dropped into the pitcher. They made a liquidy, crackling sound.

  “Doc, are you on the level?”

  Case looked up at the Realtor.

  “Pardon?”

  “I mean spookwise. You’re not into this only because of the dinero or you maybe saw Ghostbusters twice and got jazzed?”

  “I can virtually swear that number two was not the reason,” Case averred. “And as far as the dinero goes, you’re the only one I know who’s ever paid me for this work.”

  Freeboard fumbled for her cigarette pack on the bar.

  “How do you live?”

  Case eyed her with a kindly patience.

  “The university pays me,” he said gently. “I teach.”

  “Oh, yeah yeah.”

  “I’m a teacher.”

  “Hey, I got it, okay? You want to drop it?” Freeboard glared and lit her cigarette with unsteady hands, then set her solid gold lighter on the counter with a thump.

  Case lifted the pitcher and topped off her glass.

  “Another olive?” he asked her politely.

  “You married?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  She looked away and muttered, “Who gives a shit?”

  She picked up a book that was resting on the counter, standing it on end as she eyed its cover. “The Denial of Death” she read aloud. “Is this good?”

  “Yes, I think so.” Case was pouring a martini for himself. “I mean to reread it tonight,” he told her. “The author’s Ernst Becker.”

  “Who’s in it?”

  “It isn’t a movie.”

  She let the book drop.

  Case plopped an olive in his glass and took a sip.

  “Are you married, Joan?” he asked her.

  She looked down, blew out cigarette smoke and shook her head. “Never married?” he persisted.

  “Never married.”

  “Any family?”

  “All dead. I was the youngest,” Freeboard said. “I’m the last.”

  “No other relatives?”

  She looked down into her drink. “No, no one.”

  “Mr. Dare is rather close to you, I’ve noticed.”

  “He’s the only man I know would never hurt me.”

  “Men have hurt you very often, Joan?”

  Dismissively waving her hand, she said, “Ah, fuck it.”

  She plucked up her martini glass, sipped, and then set down the glass with a bang. Then she snatched at the book and stood it on end. “So what’s this all about?” she said.

  “You wouldn’t like it.”

  Abruptly she lay the book down, staring off.

  “God, I just had that déjà vu feeling again.”

  “Oh?”

  She nodded. “Yeah. Real strong.”

  Case folded his arms atop the counter, leaning forward.

  “Joan, I’d like to hear more about your work. Do you enjoy it?”

  “Shit, I love it to pieces.”

  “How nice.”

  “I’d rather sell a fucking town house than piss.”

  “That should settle any lingering ambiguity in the matter.”

  Freeboard looked out a window. “This place is so isolated.”

  “Completely.”

  “I wonder if it’s burglarized a lot.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Case without expression.

  “Well, don’t look at me like I’m some kind of retard,” she blurted, her droopy eyes narrowing with resentment. “A lot of Navy Seals later on become criminals. Why the fuck do you think Malibu keeps getting ripped off?”

  “I’d never thought of that.”

  “This place would be ripe.”

  “I see your point.”

  Freeboard tilted up the book again, narrowly avoiding knocking over her glass. Case grabbed it by the stem before it could fall.

  “Hey, man, thanks,” said Freeboard slurrily.

  “Don’t mention it,” said Case.

  “Good hands.”

  She looked back at the cover of the book.

  “And so what’s this about, Doc? Is it good?”

  “Well, it deals with our terror of death,” answered Case, “and how we avoid it by trying to distract ourselves with sex and money and power.”

  Freeboard eyed him in blank incomprehension.

  “Who needs death for all that?” she said.

  “Well, exactly.”

  She stared at the book.

  “I love my life,” she murmured.

  “So you should,” said Case. “Lots of toys.”

  Freeboard propped an elbow on the bar and then lowered her head into her hand. Case could no longer see her face. “Lots of toys,” she said weakly. She nodded. And then, the words muffled and narrow in her throat, she murmured, “Yeah, a whole lot of toys. A whole bunch.”

  Case stared. “Something wrong?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  “Can’t you tell me?”

  She was silently sobbing into her hand.

  Case set down his glass and gripped her forearm very gently.

  “Can’t you tell me? Please tell me,” he said.

  “I don’t know. Sometimes I cry and don’t know why. I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  She continued to sob.

  “What were you thinking about just now?” Case asked her.

  Freeboard shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  He touched a comforting hand to her cheek.

  “Then just cry, dear,” he said. “It’s all right.”

  He looked up as a troubled Dare entered the room and sped stiffly and immediately to the bar. The author’s glance quickly taking in Freeboard’s demeanor, he pronounced, “I see the serious drinking flag is flying.” He slid onto a stool.

  “What’s your pleasure, Mr. Dare?” Case inquired.

  “A new body,” Dare answered, “and a brain that doesn’t know who I am.”

  “I’ve got martinis all mixed.”

  “No, no, no!” Dare pointed to the liquor bottles shelved behind Case. “Please just hand me the Chivas and a glass,” he requested.

  Case reached for the bottle. “You look deathly,” he said. “What’s the trouble?”

  Case set down the bottle and looked solicitous.

  “The trouble? Well, I’ll tell you the trouble,” snapped Dare. About to speak, he caught sudden sight of Freeboard staring at him as she dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. Dare shut his mouth and turned away. He said, “Nothing.” He picked up the bottle, poured out two fingers, put it back, and then set his glass down on the bar emphatically. “Nothing’s wrong whatsoever. Not a thing.”

  Anna Trawley now entered the room. Visibly upset, she moved swiftly to the bar and sat beside Dare.

  “Hello, Anna. Have a drink?” asked Case.

  “Yes, a double,” said Trawley tightly.

  “Then I gather nothing’s wrong,” said Case.

  “Beg your pardon?” she
asked. “I didn’t get that.”

  Case stared at her innocently. “Just a comment.”

  Dare turned to look at Trawley, examining her drawn and ashen face and then her shaking hands now clasped atop the counter. He looked back into her eyes.

  “What did you see?” he asked her.

  At this Freeboard roused herself.

  She said, “What? What do you mean? Who saw what?”

  “I saw nothing,” said Trawley, staring fixedly ahead.

  “I saw less,” replied Dare.

  “Well, that settles it,” said Case. He pulled a bottle off the shelf.

  “Dry sherry with a twist?” he asked Trawley.

  She stared at him oddly.

  “Why, yes,” she said at last. “Exactly.”

  She continued to stare.

  Case saw Dare gulping down two more fingers of scotch.

  “Your health,” said Case, looking over at the author.

  “It isn’t funny,” growled Dare.

  “I didn’t say it was funny.”

  “It was nothing,” Dare insisted.

  “I know.”

  “What the fuck are you all talking about?” demanded Freeboard. She’d been glaring back and forth, her confusion and irritation mounting. Dare patted her hand. “Never mind.”

  Case put the sherry in front of Trawley. “I notice you staring,” he said to her quietly. “Are you getting any sense of something yet?”

  “Nothing new,” she said almost inaudibly.

  “I didn’t get that,” said Case.

  Her gaze bored into his eyes. “Nothing new,” she repeated.

  “Oh.”

  Case glanced to the television set. “Oh, I do wish these TVs and radios would work,” he bemoaned. “I’d so love to see the six o’clock news.”

  “Yes, no doubt,” murmured Trawley. “So would I. But I certainly don’t want to see myself on it.”

  “What was that?” asked Case.

  She said, “Nothing.”

  Trawley sipped at her sherry. Her hand was still trembling.

  “Speaking of the news,” began Case. He turned back to the bar. Dare and Freeboard, he saw, were speaking quietly together. Case cleared his throat, and said, “And now what do we think about President Clinton’s handling of foreign policy?”

  A sudden hush fell upon the room. Freeboard and Dare had abruptly stopped talking and mutely turned to stare at Case. Their expressions, like Trawley’s, were blank and numb. Not a breath, not a thought appeared to stir in the room.

  Case looked from face to face, his eyes a question.

  At last Dare frowned and asked, “Whose handling?”

  Case paused, as if waiting for something, and then answered with a tinge of what could have been regret. “Oh, I meant to say President Bush. Awfully sorry. Yes, sorry. I misspoke.”

  The trio continued to stare, still motionless, and then they all looked down into their drinks. Trawley took a sip of her sherry, then, and turned to look out a window at the blood-red massive ball of the sun slipping low upon the mud-brown waters of the river.

  “Nearly dark,” she said softly. “Night’s coming.”

  Case didn’t move. He was staring at the three of them.

  He lowered his head and shook it.

  In her room later on Trawley opened her diary, pressed it flat, reviewed her last entry, and then carefully penned her next notation:

  Past nine. Dinner over. I continue to be frightened. And what of it? To exist in the limitless dark of this universe, bruised and unknowing whence we came and where we go, to take breath on this hurtling piece of rock in the void—these alone are a terror in themselves, are they not? Fear, if we correctly observe our situation, is our ordinary way, like feeding, like dying. And yet what I’m feeling now is quite totally different; it is a tenor of another kind. Not of ghosts. There is something else here that I am sensing, something chillingly alien and implacable; I fear it even more than the world. Case wants a séance tonight. It’s so perilous. God help me. I dread what might come through that door!

  Chapter Nine

  Freeboard was sitting on the edge of her bed and the edge of her mind when she heard the rapping. Pensive and frowning, deeply troubled, her elbows were propped atop her knees while she cupped her face between her hands. Facedown and open on the bed beside her was a copy of the book, The Denial of Death. She had been reading it for a time but then her eyes had begun to hurt.

  Although not nearly as much as her head.

  The knocking again. Two raps. Much louder.

  Freeboard didn’t bother looking up.

  “Knock it off, will ya, Terry? Cut it out!”

  She heard her door opening and looked up at Dare.

  “It’s me,” he said tensely.

  “How would you know?”

  Dare came over to the bed and sat beside her.

  “Are you sitting on my glasses, Terry?”

  “No. Joan, there’s something very creepy in our midst.”

  “Please don’t start with me, Terry. I mean it.”

  “My dear, I’m dead earnest,” said Dare. She heard a tremor in his voice and looked up. He was pale and his eyes were right and blinking. “I haven’t been as frightened since I dreamed I was a Zulu trapped in the locker room of Rudyard Kipling’s club.”

  Freeboard searched his eyes and found genuine terror.

  She frowned. “You seeing things, Terry?” she asked him.

  “Joan, I swear to you, I haven’t dropped acid in years!”

  He raised his right hand as if taking an oath.

  Freeboard pondered.

  “It’s got residual effects, remember? Remember the giant squids with the ray guns and the letter of reference from Cheech and Chong?”

  Dare pushed up the sleeve of his shirt, disclosing a red and vivid welt running up from his inner wrist to his forearm. “Does this look as if I’m seeing things, Joanie? Take a look at this! Look at my arm!”

  Freeboard stared mutely at the welt for a moment. She looked up at him quizzically and said, “How’d you do that?”

  “I saw a group of people in the back of the house,” explained Dare. “Two of them were priests.”

  “They were what?”

  “I said priests!”

  “Oh, for chrissakes, Terry!”

  “I mean it! One of them threw something at me! This happened!” Freeboard reached out her hand as if about to touch the welt. Dare flinched. “No, don’t touch it!” he exclaimed.

  “Looks like a burn,” she said quietly.

  “It is!”

  Freeboard looked up at him. She looked dubious.

  “You weren’t ironing your scrapbook or anything, were you? I mean, where are these priests?”

  “I don’t know,” answered Dare. “They disappeared.”

  “They ran away?”

  “They simply vanished.”

  Freeboard turned and rolled her eyes. “Yeah, they vanished.”

  Dare thrust out his arm and showed the welt. “This didn’t!”

  She stared at it soberly. “It could have happened when Morna spilled the coffee on you, Terry.”

  “Yes, but wouldn’t I have known that?”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  “I’ve tried to call the boatman to see about getting off the island, but—”

  “You turdhead! What happened to ‘I am Doubt’?”

  “It got mugged in the alley by ‘I am burned!’ Look, the boatman didn’t answer.” Dare’s manner was earnest and pressing, urgent. “No machine, no nothing,” he continued. “I tried to call a helicopter service. No answer. I tried to call Pierre about the dogs. No answer. The service doesn’t even pick up. You remember how you asked if today was a holiday?”

  “Yeah. It’s like Manhattan got nuked or something.”

  “And have you taken a really close look at Morna?”

  Freeboard stared at Dare’s hands. They were resting on his thighs. “Why, Terry, your hands are shaking!”
she marveled.

  “All those tiny purple spots on her face and neck?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, she has them. They’re known as petechiae. I researched that for Gilroy’s Confession.”

  “And so?”

  “They’re what you see when someone dies from suffocation.”

  Freeboard stared.

  “Oh, Mr. Dare? Miss Freeboard? Are you there?”

  Case. He was calling up from the Great Room and his voice had a sinister lilting quality, as if it were coming from a fog-shrouded moor. Dare and Freeboard looked at one another in surmise.

  Where had it come from, this fear? How had it jelled?

  “Could I speak to you a moment?” Case called up to them again.

  “He sounds just like Freddy Krueger,” whispered Dare.

  “Oh, shut up!”

  Dare got up, went out the door and stepped into the hallway. Leaning over the balustrade he looked down and saw Case standing next to a round game table where Anna Trawley already was seated. “Ah, there you are,” said Case. “And Miss Freeboard? Is she there?”

  “Yeah, I hear you,” Freeboard called out from the room. “What’s up?” The next moment the Realtor appeared at the balustrade.

  “What’s harpooning?” she asked without a smile.

  “If you’ll both come down we can start the séance.”

  Chapter Ten

  “Would you sit here beside me, Mr. Dare?” Trawley asked.

  “Why beside you? Do you feel I’m more in need of vibrations?”

  “Oh, for shitssakes sit down!” Freeboard told him.

  Trawley patted the seat to her left. “Right here.”

  “Very well,” agreed Dare. He sat down.

  “And you here on my right, Miss Freeboard,” Trawley told her. Freeboard nodded and quickly took her place. Case was already in the chair across from Trawley.

  “Thank you,” said the psychic. “We can start.”